


SECOND NATURE

by daedalust



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: ??? to Lovers, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Fingers in Mouth, M/M, Thriller, Vampires, did i mention vampires, emotionally repressed hirugami sachirou, hoshiumi sexy, i really wrote 36k words because i thought hoshiumi would make a sexy vampires, sexy vampire hoshiumi kourai, touch starvation, vampire/human relationship if you squint but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:01:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28312020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daedalust/pseuds/daedalust
Summary: A vampire named Kourai meets a not-human, not-vampire boy named Sachirou. The story of love in purgatory, the wolf who falls for the lamb-it-can't-eat, and a human named after happiness.
Relationships: Hirugami Sachirou/Hoshiumi Kourai
Comments: 27
Kudos: 65
Collections: HiruHoshi Fics





	1. Part I: First Nature

**Author's Note:**

> cw: blood, violence, implied sexual content, references to child abuse/ family problems, childhood trauma, references to unhealthy past relationships, mentions of death, sudden attacks. let me know if there's anything I need to tag! you can reach me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/kurapikasdad)!
> 
> (merry christmas ellie. thank you for requesting hiruhoshi from your secret santa. i took all of the tropes you liked and wrote a fic. i also know you like when authors have fun writing what you read. i had lots of fun. i love you ♥ and your posts and everything else. i hope you'll like this hirugami. and thank you to jennie & isa for keeping me sane while writing this-- jennie i hope you see where you've inspired me.)

**_i. an encounter far from home_ **

_“Sachirou-kun. Do you remember why your mother and father gave you that name?”_

_“It’s such an old one Granny. All the kids at school say it’s weird.”_

_“When you get older you’ll understand. Out of all your siblings’ names, I think it’s my favorite, Sachirou. They gave you that name so that you can be happy.”_

“Sorry Granny.”

Sachirou exhales a cloud of cold air that swirls and blends in with the medley of flashing neon lights that adorn Tokyo’s fashionable Shinjuku district. The memory of his grandmother emerges without warning from the recesses of his drunken haze. He knows that if she was looking down on him right this instant, from her vantage point in heaven, she would be sorely disappointed for a number of reasons.

First, he’s 21 years old and has never experienced the fated happiness that his name was supposed to bring him. Sachirou’s life has been a series of continuous decisions that she’d disapprove of. He’s so far from his family and the fate they’d chosen for him that he can’t recall the last time he’s seen their faces, tired of skirting over knives with bare feet.

Second, his grandmother’s dying wish was for him to find a nice person to marry and have a family of his own by the time he reached his 22nd birthday. February 3rd is only a couple months away and Sachirou has no such plans. Tonight, he’s tagging along with a group of college acquaintances to one of the new gay bars that’s opened in the city, aptly named Ninth Circle. He plans to have some mindless fun tonight, because he’s getting tired of the numbness in his chest.

Sachirou couldn’t be further from home. For the most part, he was grateful for that. 

His friends were lagging behind, taking their sweet time to continue dancing, drinking, and mingling with sweaty strangers. Sachirou had his own run-in with a handsome blonde who leaned in too close for comfort, who reeked of some unpleasantly coppery scent. He was four drinks in when he decided that he’d had enough socializing for the day, opting for fresh air to nurse his budding headache.

The snow crunches under his feet with every step, the pavement around him so icy that he struggles to keep balance. _What a way to go_ , Sachirou thinks, imagining how it’d feel to slip, fall, and hit his head on the cold concrete. He imagines that out of everyone in his family, his dog Kotarou would miss him the most, followed by his sister Shouko. He can’t fathom how his parents or Fukuro would react; they’re from different worlds it feels like. Each step he takes into the cold night, further from the muffled club music, feels like a step into the unknown.

He’s mulling over his drunken haze of thoughts when suddenly, a flash of movement in the dark catches his eye. Sachirou has a weak spot for animals, especially ones in need, and he imagines this cat must be cold and hungry, running around the city like that in the winter. He follows, surprisingly nimble now for someone who struggled to keep balance moments ago. Each scene, each glimpse of the city blurs together like streaks of light. 

He’s pursuing without realizing that he’s being pursued.

The predators mask themselves in the shadows, senses honed from centuries of standing upon a mountain of nameless bones before them. Sachirou leaves a ribbon of scent through the city, rousing unwanted attention from the monsters that stalk the night.

“Hook, line, and sinker.”

Sachirou finally catches up to the cat, or rather, the cat suddenly stops in a narrow spot between two buildings. He walks closer, only for the cat to face him with a curious yellow-eyed expression, that feels too _knowing_ to belong to an innocent cat. His thoughts, muddled by the sickly-sweet alcohol running through his veins, finally catch up to him. 

He’s stepped into a trap.

Before Sachirou can plan his next move, he’s backed into the corner. It’s checkmate and his feet are frozen to the floor as he’s being circled by not just one, but two opponents around his size. 

Instinctively, he digs a hand into his brown jacket, fishing for his wallet among crumpled-up receipts. He figured it was just a pair of rag-tag muggers stalking the city for easy prey, but he’d been careless going out alone. Sachirou is taller than the average man with strength to back it up. It’s the first time he’s ever been cornered in a fight.

“How much do you want?” he asks, speaking nonchalantly as if he’s just been stopped in the middle of a pleasant walk. He flips through the bills casually, when suddenly he feels an iron grip around his wrist. He turns this head to look at his assailant, whose expression was uncannily similar to his— heavy-lidded, unbothered, and calm.

“We don’t want your money,” the stranger says. He’s tall, broad, and college-aged with parted gray hair and cold, crimson eyes. He twists Sachirou’s arm sadistically, making him cry out in pain. “Your pain tolerance is pretty good for a human.”

 _For a human?_

The words ring through Sachirou’s ears, sending ripples down his subconscious. No, it couldn’t be. These people had to be insane, or he’s stumbled across some poorly-acted street play. He thinks of those supernatural blockbusters his sister used to watch voraciously, spending his childhood rolling his eyes and bearing through the effusive dialogue...

“Looks like he does have emotions after all,” a leering voice behind Sachirou says, exhaling cold air down his neck. A cloud of white breath surrounds him that reeks of copper, stinging his nostrils. “Hey Curly. Remember me?”

It’s the blonde from earlier, who had danced too close to him at Ninth Circle. His face is malevolent, illuminated by the golden streetlight, and Sachirou wonders if he’s seeing double. The strangers are nearly identical, but distinguishable by their jarringly different facial expressions.

While the gray-haired man’s eyes are glazed over, bearing an expression reminiscent of boredom, his twin’s eyes are alight. Full of vitality and insatiable hunger that makes Sachirou immediately believe that what he’s dealing with is a supernatural force that wants to eat him whole.

“Are you a cannibal?” Sachirou asks, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible. He’s staring death back in the face, but figures if he has to go, he’d prefer to keep his dignity. His cheekiness earns him an unexpected smack across the face, a white-hot flash of pain.

“Don’t put us on the same level as you filthy pigs,” the blonde man snaps, his smug expression shifting to anger. He grabs Sachirou and pins him to the dirty brick wall behind them, almost spitting as he talks. “You talk like you’re looking down on us.”

“I don’t even know who you are,” Sachirou chokes out, his hands instinctively reaching out to grab the stranger’s arm, a futile attempt. _Or what you are._ The blonde gives a cocky smile, exposing two abnormally long canine teeth that jut down to his lower lip.

“Well Curly, I don’t care what your name is. You’re human, and it doesn’t matter to me. But for your last minutes on Earth, I’ll give you the parting gift of getting to know your killer’s name. Miya Atsumu,” the stranger leans in closer, inches away from the nape of Sachirou’s neck. “And the guy in the back is my brother, Miya Osamu.You’re just fresh meat.”

“‘Tsumu,” Osamu speaks up, in a scathing voice. “You’re stressing out our prey. You’ll further degrade the flavor profile of his blood if you keep doing that. Watch yourself.”

 _Blood… non-human…_ Sachirou is smart enough to put two and two together. He didn’t believe in vampires ten minutes ago, and a nagging part of him wants to continue denying he does to rile up the man named Atsumu. 

If he can’t fight with his body, he’ll fight with his mouth. If these were indeed vampires, he was dead anyways. If these were humans acting out some sick fantasy on an innocent passerby, this was his chance to humiliate them. 

“So, you’re vampires?” Sachirou lets out a pleasant laugh. “You two look too old to play dress up.”

His remark earns him another lash across his face, Atsumu burying his hand like a claw into the recesses of Sachirou’s soft hair. He’s pulling and pulling until Sachirou sees stars falling from the night sky into his vision. Atsumu’s nails are like talons, carving rivers of blood into his scalp. 

“There’s nothing more that I hate than food that talks back,” Atsumu hisses, his expression frenzied. “Yeah, we’re vampires.”

Sachirou is wincing in pain, fighting back his urge to tear up as Atsumu’s grip on him gets tighter and tighter. He still has enough energy for one final retort.

“You’ll have to do more than talk to convince me,” Sachirou grits his teeth, hissing out what could very well be his final words. There’s no such thing as making a mistake when all outcomes lead to death. “Go ahead and bite me. Show me you’re more than just plastic fangs and red contact lenses.”

A wicked glint flickers across Atsumu’s eyes as the chance to show off presents itself. He licks his bottom lip, his fingers dancing down the side of Sachirou’s face, down his neck, tracing his collarbones. “It’s going to hurt,” Atsumu coos before biting down on Sachirou’s neck, hard.

As Atsumu’s fangs tear past his soft skin like nothing, Sachirou lets out a bloodcurdling scream. Probably the first scream he’s ever let out in his twenty something years of living, his parents always told him he was eerily quiet as a baby, never crying even when Shouko poked, prodded, and pinched him. 

Sachirou thrashes around on a dingy, cold street miles from him, his senses numbed by unfathomable pain. Death is ugly.

“‘Tsumu! What the hell are you doing?” Osamu grabs the collar of Atsumu’s jacket and throws him to the ground, his composure lost. He’s just as feral, if not more than his brother, beating him into the ground. “You impatient bastard… you’ve tainted our meal! You promised me we could take this one back home alive so that I could preserve the fragrance.”

“As if there’s anything left? ‘Samu, take a whiff of him. Your precious blood is married with cheap alcohol anyways!”

As the twins fight, Sachirou can’t catch a single breath. His veins are popping out in all of the wrong places, hot ropes of pain coiling around his chest, arms, and neck. Minutes feel like hours with his entire body pulsing with each heartbeat, the toxin coursing through his vein gripping the life out of his heart. 

_“Good night Sachirou-kun. Be a good boy to your parents.”_

_“Granny, where are you going?”_

Darkness closes in on Sachirou’s vision, and he sees a dark tunnel before him with no light in sight, calling his name. He begins to take a step forward when suddenly, he feels a cold rush of air by the side of his face. 

When Sachirou thinks that it’s certain he’ll never move again, a current of wind sweeps him off the ground like an answered prayer. Picked up by the hand of God.

He’s moving. Maybe faster than he’s ever moved before. Alive, in spite of the agonizing pain. He phases in and out of this scene, hearing someone spew vulgarities far behind him.

“Fucking seagull snatched our meal!” Atsumu’s voice is distant enough to give Sachirou a sense of security. 

He knows that they’re probably far out of Shinjuku at this rate, maybe even Tokyo, the chase spanning across several districts.

With a wary eye, Sachirou looks up at his savior. He sees the moon in the starry night sky, but also something far brighter than it. The tunnel in his mind has completely vanished with this new light, and he sees the glimpse of a face. Curious, youthful, but too mature to belong to a boy. Too ethereal to exist outside of dreams. 

“Go to sleep now,” the voice says. It’s urging, but gentle. “I’ll take care of you.”

Sachirou feels a hand over his eyelids, and the feeling of exhaustion washes over him. Safe for the first time that night, he succumbs to the darkness, letting the stranger pull a blanket over his subconscious. 

✧

Sachirou wakes up, after what feels like a month of slipping in and out of dreams with sparse brushes of reality. He’s lying down on a scratched-up leather sofa, swearing that he’s lived about twenty different lifetimes, imbued with borrowed memories. He wakes up insatiably hungry, his stomach folding upon itself violently with each rumble.

The thrill of a hunt. Blood on his hands. He vividly remembers these alien sensations, intermingled with brief flashes of another body pressed over his. Restraining him from flying, begging him to never let up the act of living. 

Sachirou convinces himself that the only real memory was going to Ninth Circle with his friends, getting drunk out of his mind, and everything that happened afterward was a lucid nightmare. He turns his eyes up to the ceiling, realizing there are no lights installed above. Odd.

It dawns on him that he’s not in his own apartment. 

Sachirou bolts upright and looks around wildly, finding nothing familiar in his surroundings. Was he stupid enough to go home with someone? The apartment he wakes up in looks as if its been abandoned for decades, dark and cluttered, stairs where there shouldn’t be stairs, and he gasps as he sees bloodstains on the concrete floor. He’s about to break into his flight instinct, when a voice echoes through the room. A figure walks down the stairs.

“Welcome to the world of the living, Sleeping Beauty. Was wondering when you’d come around.”

Sachirou looks up to the sight of a man with short-white hair, looking angelic as he radiates with light that’s absent from the room. He’s dressed in nothing but black jeans and his feral luminous, red eyes are fixated on him, studying him intently. 

“Where am I?”

The man pulls out a chair and turns it around, taking a seat with his legs spread open and his chest propped against the backrest. If Sachirou wasn’t so startled by the change of scenery, he would have appreciated how strikingly good looking his company was, his tousled white hair spilling over his forehead like feathers. Muscle in every inch of his body. Piercing blood-red eyes that only see him.

The stranger shoots Sachirou a quizzical look, musing over the question before answering.

“The question you should be asking is, ‘who have you become?’”

✧

**_ii. becoming part of your world_ **

Sachirou is no longer human. In fact, he’s not even a vampire. The stranger explains that Sachirou has become an entity that exists in the limbo between two worlds: too human to run around with vampires and too vampire to coexist with humans. The blood that still courses through his veins is a rare delicacy, a prized ambrosia to vampires that marks him for death. The newfound hunger that rests in the bit of his stomach, chewing his intestines with furor, craves an excess of human blood.

In short, Sachirou can’t go anywhere. He’s become some pseudo-vampire-human-hybrid species without a name, population one. First of his kind, designed to be a temporary flicker of existence as he’s faulty in all ways pertaining to survival. He processes this information, expecting the news to hit him harder than it does. He remains unflinching.

Non-belonging. A living purgatory. Sachirou lives that way already.

The stranger introduces himself as a vampire with the given name Hoshiumi Kourai. A name that sounds straight out of a manga, or forged from some grand delusion. Not that Sachirou is one to talk with such a rare name himself. He’s a young vampire, around Sachirou’s age who’s reached the peak of his phenotypical maturity. Young, beautiful, and immortal.

A fantasy that people Sachirou’s age dream of, but will never have.

“Peter Pan?” Sachirou interrupts, to which Hoshiumi responds, “Who?”

Hoshiumi speaks with an air of bravado, pacing in front of Sachirou while spelling out his fate. It’s not every day that he’s the expert in the room, describing how the world works to a blank-slate of an audience. He relishes in his superiority of becoming the king of Sachirou’s new world.

Sachirou looks past the spectacle of a man and spaces out at the wall. He’s spaced out long ago, limbs hunched over like a bird with clipped wings, listless on the bottom of a cage. His lack of reaction incites an explosive reaction from Hoshiumi, who isn’t getting the awe he anticipates.

“That’s it? That’s your reaction to everything I’m telling you!?” Hoshiumi says in disbelief. Sachirou shrugs.

“There’s nothing I can do about it from what you’re saying. I’m just accepting it as it is,” Sachirou replies. He’s become a series of knots, turning and tightening from within.

Even if he’s familiar with unbelonging, the claustrophobia of the situation closes its hand around him. He’s not even sure if it’s safe to step outside in the daylight, he laments sleeping through what could have been his last sun. And yet, he refuses to betray his panic. 

“What are you? _Immovable_?”

Hoshiumi moves close to him. Uncomfortably close. Sachirou can see his unyielding reflection in Kourai’s eyes. He wonders if he’s been allowed to keep the brown in his own eyes. 

✧

The caustic hunger that licks his insides raw is enough proof to Sachirou that he’s transcended humanity. He continues to stave off Hoshiumi’s offer to share blood nonetheless, offending the vampire who’s given him the silent treatment in response. 

He’s caught Hoshiumi muttering under his breath that he’s _not usually someone who shares_ , and Sachirou denies him out of spite.

His hunger is now five days in the making, intensifying to the point it interrupts his sleep.

Sachirou knows how it’s like to be hungry. He’s suppressed the sensation countless times as a college student, forgoing meals to adhere to a budget and missing dining hall hours to sleep. He imagines the same feeling to a magnitude of a thousand.

He smells crowds of humans, gathering miles away for a concert. Blood, sweat, movement.

Sachirou’s mouth waters. His saliva burns like an acid that can only be neutralized by a bloodbath.

_Break the windows. Chase it. Go wild._

Hoshiumi overpowers him, pinning him to the couch the moment he catches wind of Sachirou’s intent. His fingers are lead chains wrapped around a rabid dog’s neck, like the too-real sensations that Sachirou remembers in between dreams. 

“What did you do to me when I was asleep?” Sachirou asks under his breath.

“Stopping you from hurting other people and marking you to mask your scent. You’re a two-edged sword to both of your identities,” Hoshiumi explains roughly, using all his strength to keep Sachirou’s close.

Hoshiumi shoves a pouch into Sachirou’s balled up fist, guiding his hands to his lips. “Drink.”

The metallic taste coats the inside of Sachirou’s mouth like a syrup, staining the lining of his mouth, his teeth, and his throat on its way down. He’s surprised to find it more nostalgic than viscerally disgusting. The last time he tasted so much blood was when he practiced volleyball with his sister, taking a hard spike to the face.

Sachirou drains the pouch like a suckling pig. He feels fuller and fuller, his mind becoming clearer to the point that he realizes that moments ago, he lost his mind.

“Most people break faster than you do,” Hoshiumi whispers, letting go of Sachirou’s arm. Finger by finger. He’s impressed by Sachirou’s resolve to turn his offer of blood down, abnormal for a newborn. “But even the strongest of us are at the mercy of natural instinct.”

“This is how awful your hunger feels… and I’m supposed to place my faith in you,” Sachirou breathes. His head is spinning, taking a first step into his hazy new identity, guided by someone who he senses wants to cut into him like a knife. “Why are you helping me?”

Hoshiumi pauses, mulling over the question. He’s been asking himself the same thing ever since the night he snatched Sachirou away from the Miya twins, wondering what’s stopping him from giving into his own desire, which is very much present. 

“You look like someone who needed help.”

A cop-out answer. Hoshiumi knows it.

✧

Sachirou hunches over the sink, gurgling and spitting out water that gets pinker and clearer with every repetition. He stares hard at his reflection in the fluorescent lights, grateful to see his eyes are still chocolate brown. His heart beats, unlike Hoshiumi’s. He learns the danger of daytime isn’t the sun’s rays— unlike vampires in movies— but rather that it’s the time humans are out and about, teasing his lust for blood.

He’s grateful his appearance hasn’t changed much, keeping him grounded to his forsaken humanity. His hair is still brown, messy and wavy, a nightmare to manage without product. He’ll make do with water for now. 

There’s a bite mark on his neck, left behind by Atsumu. Sachirou traces it with his finger. Hoshiumi scowled at it minutes ago, claiming that it reeked while explaining its functionality.

“A bite mark can serve as a locating feature for vampires, useful if the prey gets away. Think of it as a string that attaches you to Miya Atsumu,” Hoshiumi said to him, stretching a loose thread on his dark jacket taut. “His venom runs through your veins. Not enough enough to transform you into a full vampire, but enough to start a reaction in your blood.”

“Can’t you finish it off?”

Hoshiumi smirks. “I wouldn’t if I could. You’d rather be dead, I promise you. Besides, another vampire can’t intervene in the process. If I ever injected my venom in you too, it’d start off another reaction in your blood that’ll give you a toxic shock. You’ll die.”

“So, how do I live?”

“Atsumu or someone with his same brand of venom chooses to transform you into a vampire, but he doesn’t see you that way. He sees you as nothing but a fragrant piece of meat.”

Sachirou figured as much. Hoshiumi touched the bite marks with cold fingertips, and drew his fingers to the tip of his nose, inhaling deeply.

“Your scent basically calls for him now. In fact, the longer time it’s on you, your blood matures and it becomes more fragrant. Similar to how humans like to age wine for some reason. It’s why the twins love playing with their food before they eat it— the Miya Osamu special. He’s one of those ‘pretentious’ kinds of guys who doesn’t just drink blood, but savors it. Personally, I hate vampires like that.”

_Aren’t you playing with me right now, Hoshiumi?_

Hoshiumi looks at him like he’s eyeing a new toy, a tool that satisfies some hidden want that Sachirou can only guess at. He’s caught the man staring at him a few times, his lips parted as if to ask a question but no sound comes out. 

There’s nothing but distance between them— physically measured in meters, figuratively measured in worlds.

Living with a vampire was like existing on the blade of a knife. If you move, you get sliced open. If you stay perfectly still like a well-mannered doll, you give up your freedom for a chance of survival. Hoshiumi’s body always tenses like a spring, and Sachirou isn’t sure what’s keeping him at bay.

Sachirou resurfaces from the water again to meet the mirror, examining his face. He pulls down his bottom lip to look at his teeth. He wants to peel back every layer of skin and tissue to understand what he’s become. 

Atsumu’s venom courses through his veins, and Sachirou’s dreams are someone else’s memories. He closes his eyes and he sees Osamu. He sees a coven of nameless faces, staring back at him with red eyes. Calling out for him. Telling him to meet his fate, which he can’t resist forever.

Sachirou splashes his face with water. 

✧

Having a vampire as a roommate isn’t so bad, Sachirou learns. 

Hoshiumi disappears during the night and keeps to his locked room during the day, giving Sachirou the space to unfurl his existence and claim the living room as his new home.

He’s careful not to intrude without asking—a courtesy from one vampire, and they spend their days separately. Sachirou has a hobby of watching birds fly by the window, reading old magazines that are hoarded in random corners of the apartment. He’s been reported as a missing person, which only adds to reasons he can’t leave. 

He and Hoshiumi, worlds apart, are bound together by a daily ritual. At sunset every day, Hoshiumi enters the living room, calling for him.

“Come here.”

Sachirou gets up from his position, walking to Hoshiumi like his life depends on it. Hoshiumi caresses the side of his face, more apologetic than tender. They never call each other by name, never extending an iron branch of emotion. 

Hoshiumi reapplies the mask that’s keeping Sachirou safe, bringing his mouth to Sachirou’s neck and brushing his lips on every inch of bare skin he can find. It’s a vampire ritual called “anointing,” founded on the principle that in terms of scent, saliva is only one degree as poignant as blood.

“Is this real, or are you trying to make up an excuse to flirt with me?” Sachirou mutters, though he’s holding back the urge to shudder as Hoshiumi runs his tongue against the nape of his neck.

“Want to run out into the street and find out?” Hoshiumi snaps, annoyed. “Right now, Miya Atsumu thinks you’re as good as dead. That I’ve drained you dry. That’s because he can’t smell you, even if he’s in my territory.”

Hoshiumi admits it’s not typically something vampires do with each other. Normally, vampires that cluster together are born from the same entity who created them, giving them a homogenous identity and scent. 

“And when does this come in handy?” Sachirou whispers, holding his breath as Hoshiumi stops by his ear. He’s lying on the couch, his hands sprawled by his side and his hair spread over the surface, a light milky brown.

“Between lovers,” Hoshiumi exhales, his lips curling into a mischievous smirk. For a second, Sachirou can’t help but shut his eyes, not used to beholding so much light and beauty. “Or hiding the deed.”

Sachirou has to get the last word, never hesitating in the face of an opponent. Especially one that might be poking fun at his naïveté. “So what does that make me then? Your dirty little secret?” he teases, pushing a hand on Hoshiumi’s chest above him.

“Yeah,” Hoshiumi replies, moving his face back to Sachirou’s neck, siphoning him in sharply like a draft of cold wind. The smell of Atsumu on Sachirou’s neck presses down on buttons Hoshiumi didn’t realize he had. 

Sachirou feels Hoshiumi’s lips and tongue against the throbbing bite mark on his neck. “Filthy. Especially here.”

He swipes his tongue against the puncture wounds aggressively, as if to seal them shut. Washing away Atsumu’s trace on Sachirou’s body, at least for the next 24 hours. Hoshiumi steps back to admire his handiwork.

“It’s almost like you’re mine.”

✧

Hoshiumi Kourai is strong. Really strong. He demonstrates it whenever he can, picking up a stone and pulverizing it between his fingers, leaving nothing but sand. It’s a sharp reminder of the realm of existence between vampires and humans, and Sachirou falls somewhere in between that.

“You can become like this too, if you want. I’ll teach you.” Hoshiumi glances over his shoulder at Sachirou, who watches him because there’s nothing else to look at any more. The sun is down, the birds are gone, and the light is too dim for reading. 

A normal person in Sachirou’s situation would have gone mad by now. Holed up in an apartment with someone who still felt like a complete stranger, stuck in a purgatory of identities, Sachirou knows that as long as he stays put, he’ll stay alive. But as the days stretch longer and he grows more listless by the minute, he asks himself if this is a life he _wants_ to live. 

He thinks about animals in zoos that go insane from the stress of being unable to leave their makeshift enclosures. Sachirou decides he’d rather die a quick death than watch himself decay to such a state. He can’t imagine Hoshiumi enjoys being a captor either; when he’s not staring, he acts like his guest is just another piece of furniture in his compound. One that he would undoubtedly stop from escaping.

Sachirou knows he has to break through Hoshiumi’s guard first to test the limits of his freedom. He accepts the vampire’s offer, lifting his hand up for Hoshiumi to inspect, communicating with his eyes.

 _Teach me how to use this newfound strength._

Sachirou keeps the last part to himself.

_So that I can leave you._

✧

Hoshiumi decides not to go out during the nighttime, an abrupt decision that breaks his habit. Sachirou, who hoped to match his sleep schedule to be awake when Hoshiumi is out, thinks of this as a spanner in his plans. He wakes up from his afternoon nap, to see the young vampire still there.

There’s a large window that begins at the floor and stops right before the ceiling, overlooking the city below them as well as a panoramic view of the sky. The night sky is in full view, littered with stars and the biggest moon Sachirou has ever seen. And then there’s Hoshiumi Kourai, bathing in the moonlight, rivaling the stars.

The part of Sachirou that appreciates beauty is drawn to Hoshiumi. He finds it hard to tear his eyes from his visage, in the way it’s difficult to stop indulgences halfway. Hoshiumi’s body is sculpted in a way that tells stories of unseen hard-fought battles and grueling self-discipline that Sachirou can only guess at when they train together. 

He’s the closest living creature to an angel. Sachirou half-expects a pair of feathery white wings, the same texture as his pixie-length hair, to spring from his back like a second evolution. Everything about Hoshiumi paints an image of glory, of beauty and strength. 

If only he was a seraph, and not a vampire.

The part of Sachirou that is reasonable, and still thankfully dominates over his other senses, knows letting himself feel this way is the definition of a bad decision. 

Hoshiumi— a lifeform who feeds on vulnerable humans— is designed to be alluring. It’d be foolish to let himself get attached, and Sachirou is a skilled practitioner at keeping his emotions at bay. He can manage temptation, but it’s the first time he’s dealing with something inhuman.

In the short time he’s known Hoshiumi, Sachirou associates him with motion. He doesn’t stay put even when they’re talking, always opting to pace. Ever-flying, like birds he loves.

The times that they’re mimicking a template of intimacy, Hoshiumi is flighty, his touches twitchy, never still or lingering. It’s the opposite of everything Sachirou is, taught to be poised and disciplined since he was a child. Hoshiumi is a light that flickers, a body of water composed of currents, with nowhere to rest.

But right now, Hoshiumi is everything he’s never been before. Quiet, still, and looking pensively into the distance and for the first time, Sachirou can’t get a read on him. Something’s disrupted the flow of constants that Hoshiumi adheres to so deeply. 

Whatever it is, it unnerves Sachirou, who shifts in his makeshift bed of blankets. What he can’t read, he can’t block out. He pretends to sleep. 

“I know you’re still awake.”

Hoshiumi breaks the silence, Sachirou’s stomach dipping like he’s been caught. His eyes are sharp as ever, a vibrant red. 

Sachirou sees a lonely monster in the dark.

Meeting Hoshiumi’s eyes, Sachirou feels something in his chest stir. _Kill it in its tracks,_ he begs silently. 

He knows the expression in Hoshiumi’s eyes well, recognizing it as the same kind of look he’s gotten from countless boys in the past. They’re eyes that search his soul, trying to find something there and Sachirou can’t do anything but lift up his shield, trying to block the light. 

_Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not going to find anything here._

✧

Their nightly interaction has the opposite reaction to what Sachirou hoped to communicate. The ice that once held Hoshiumi together starts melting rapidly, and Sachirou can’t build dams fast enough to contain it. 

Words start spilling out of Hoshiumi like rivulets of water following gravity. Sachirou learns that once Hoshiumi warms up to a presence, he starts overflowing with opinions and things to say. Sachirou’s tried hiding behind books he’s reading, but Hoshiumi invades the space, breaking through paper with his tongue.

“What do you think of me?” Hoshiumi drops into the seat right in front of him at the small wooden table Sachirou treats as his new library. “First impressions.”

Sachirou sets the magazine down, knowing it’s futile to try to ignore Hoshiumi Kourai, who starts occupying the space between them with his posture. 

“Strong. Fast. Not human,” Sachirou responds, privately delighting in the fact that he’s not giving Hoshiumi what he wants to hear. “I’m basically just a human that has an appetite for blood, right? You know you’re more impressive than I am right now.”

Hoshiumi grimaces, like he’s been stung. Sachirou wants to smile and provoke him further, to show him that he’s not here to be part of some self-masturbatory power play. “It’s a shame the world’s strongest vampire is wasting his time, protecting someone so weak,” Sachirou presses on, thumbing the dog-eared corner on his closed magazine.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Hoshiumi’s voice is guttural, like a snarl.

Sachirou knows he’s on the brink of another impassioned rant. The second one in a day.

“What’s the point in being the strongest if you don’t have anyone to protect? What’s the point in living forever if you don’t have someone to share it with. You probably think that’s what I’m going to say, huh?” Hoshiumi shoots back, sending a pointed look Sachirou’s direction. 

Sachirou cocks an eyebrow at him. _Go on._

“But you’re a whole decade behind. Those are questions I used to have, but I’ve learned that I’m perfectly fine spending all of eternity protecting myself and my special interests. It has nothing to do with you.”

Sachirou gives a cursory grin. Maybe they are more similar than he gives Hoshiumi credit for. 

“I’m sure an existence like yours gets pretty lonely,” Sachirou says, matter-of-factly. He sees an opportunity to probe for the answer he’s looking for. “Are you looking for someone to fill that void?”

The mention of loneliness seems to flip a switch in Hoshiumi, a light going off in his eyes that Sachirou doesn’t know is friendly or not. 

“I’m not completely alone. There are others like me, as you’ve seen. There’s tons of vampires all throughout Japan. There’s Hinata Shouyou of Karasuno, who has the highest body count for vampires in his cohort that he’s transformed himself. Ushiwaka of Shiratorizawa, whose coven is selective and strong. In fact, if you want to know about “filling the void”... I have some history with them.”

Hoshiumi lifts his shirt to reveal scars on his abdomen. Sachirou gasps at the sight of his rippled muscles marred with marks, the kind of expression that Hoshiumi wants to see whenever he shows off. A spark goes off. He points at some of the streaks on his back. 

“I mean, I let them do some of this to me. All consensual. Then the rest were from fights with the same people. Ah, let’s say I’m not the greatest at relationships,” he says smugly, as if his experience is something to show off. 

_Egomaniac_ , Sachirou fights the urge to roll his eyes. He couldn’t care less.

“Vampires have physical needs too, and usually you shouldn’t fool around outside of _your people_ but hey, when has that ever stopped me? That’s why I’m so good at hiding my tracks.”

Sachirou is glad he’s not in the middle of drinking anything, because he’s imagining spitting out his water in surprise. Hoshiumi raises an eyebrow, noticing Sachirou’s journey of facial expressions. “Oh? I’ve never seen your face change so much,” he says, leaning in. “What? Don’t tell me… are you?”

Hoshiumi has ripped whatever reins Sachirou has over his composure and he knows it. 

“Put your shirt back on,” Sachirou replies flatly, unsure what’s come over him. He’s starting to imagine Hoshiumi as a human, which is dangerous in its own way. 

“Your heart started racing back there,” Hoshiumi leers, drumming the table with his fingers. His ears are perked up, listening. “All that blood running through your body is coursing faster. Are you shy?”

Remembering how a stoic face looked like, Sachirou regains control over his expression, evening it out. His senses come flooding back into him, and with them, his latent knowledge of dealing with men who proposition him in roundabout ways.

He’s a bit disappointed that Hoshiumi Kourai is less special than he thought in that regard, intentions shining clearly. Men, no matter what species, always want the same thing. Hoshiumi sees him as a guest who’ll become an instrument of gratification for him. 

Hoshiumi senses Sachirou’s reservations, backing away. “Hey, you’re new to this, aren’t you? I misjudged you then.”

Sachirou straightens his back and stares straight back at Hoshiumi with lazy brown eyes that hide away his emotions. Unimpressed.

“You’re so full of yourself,” Sachirou replies, much to Hoshiumi’s displeasure. “I was just in awe that anyone could be so self-centered, that’s all.”

He imagines Hoshiumi sees him as a pretty fruit. A nice kitchen decoration for a herculean ego. 

_You don’t know that I’m done with being pleasing to others._

Sachirou knows the role Hoshiumi wants him to play better than anyone else. He was born to please, shackling down his free will and shutting his mouth since the day he was born. Adults loved him as a child. Boys loved him to fill their emptiness. 

His friends call him “too pretty for his own good” since all of college, he’s attracted unwanted attention. Sometimes he doesn’t mind receiving it, especially from men he doesn’t mind spending time with. He used to give himself away for fun, enjoying the words of affirmation and faux affection that put a bandage over the wounds of being an unloved child. 

Plastic love, like the praises that Hoshiumi spares him when they’re close.

_Sorry Hoshiumi. You pretty fruit has nothing left inside. All eaten away by the insects before you._

Sachirou swears to never give himself away again. He’s retired from that role indefinitely, still far from happiness but closer to nature. He defies Hoshiumi by playing innocent, wielding bluntness and knows he’s saving them both.

Hoshiumi stands before him, still demanding answers.

“Also,” Sachirou’s eyes drift downward, adding insult to injury. “Your fly’s open if you couldn’t tell.”

Hoshiumi lets out a disparaging noise. He retreats back and zips his pants back up. Sachirou gives him a sweet smile, the kind of eyes he gives his dog whenever Kotarou follows an order.

Hoshiumi sees through him, his scowl deepening.

“You really,” Hoshiumi starts, fumbling with his words. “You’re really something. Maybe I should just leave you to the wolves.”

“Vampires.”

A vein pops on Hoshiumi’s temple. Based on how this interaction is going, Hoshiumi doesn’t want to try again.

“You know what I mean.” 

✧

For the next month, Hoshiumi never stays the night again. He keeps his respectable distance, and even their daily sessions of intimacy have been reduced to the bare minimum. 

Hoshiumi draws him by the collar of his shirt, swipes his tongue on the bite mark, and pushes him away. Concise so that no attachments have time to form. He returns to being a constant. 

Sachirou can finally plan around Hoshiumi’s consistent routine, finally seeing an avenue of opportunity to escape. He hones his strength in the meantime, able to bend metal between his index and thumb finger with ease, pressing split pipes into thin wafers with minimal effort. 

A part of him is sad that it has to be like this, noting that Hoshiumi never once stopped training him or anointing him in spite of the current state of their working relationship.

Sachirou knows deep down he’s probably misjudged Hoshiumi on some fundamental level, but it’s not a thought he wants to entertain. Exploring any reason for him to stay would just be a hindrance.

He wakes up one day and decides it’s his last one at this apartment, tired of re-enacting what he imagines a dying relationship to be like.

It’s almost like something out of a dark comedy, Sachirou thinks, where he’s been spirited away by a handsome gay vampire, but he’s not keen enough to enjoy the fantasy. People have always joked he had the appearance and demeanor of a romantically beleaguered drama lead, and this experience confirms his belief that he’d be shitty at it. The curse of self-awareness. 

Planning makes the day go by faster and the sunset springs itself on Sachirou while he’s in the middle of planning out his means to escape. Hoshiumi emerges from his room, where he’s been locked away all day, watching human movies that Sachirou can vaguely recognize from dialogue alone. He wonders if vampires have their own network of entertainment.

“Hey,” Hoshiumi greets him, his voice and body tense. A part of Sachirou feels guilty for creating an environment like this, feeling as if he’s shot down a bird that was eager to fly. The least he can do is what he’s told.

Sachirou walks up to Hoshiumi. He has doubts over this whole “anointing” thing, wondering if it’s just some excuse to bolster the attraction between them. He figures once he escapes, he’ll find out. 

If he’s being honest with himself, it’s highly effective in making him lose his mind, even for a second. Hoshiumi’s lips brush the side of his neck, sending a chill through his body.

He knows if they were human, he’d probably touch him back and do whatever it took to feed the flickering flame between them. Sachirou imagines that he wouldn’t hesitate to mold to the shapes Hoshiumi wants. If he’s completely honest, he’s fantasized about it a few times. He sees the loneliness in Hoshiumi’s eyes and wishes he could be the one to smother the loneliness out of Hoshiumi’s eyes.

He can’t. 

Hoshiumi licks his wound, grimacing at the taste he endures for Sachirou’s protection. 

It has the weight of a last kiss. Except only Sachirou knows it, and Hoshiumi doesn’t— bliss in ignorance. The sky of fire, bearing the last traces of the fallen sunset, transitions to a cool blue, coaxing out the city lights. Hoshiumi takes it as his cue to leave, sparing a glance behind at Sachirou that lingers for a second too long.

_Does he see through me?_

“Something wrong?” Sachirou asks as calmly as he can.

“No,” Hoshiumi answers, looking away. There’s a feeling that sets over the young vampire that feels oddly nostalgic. A strange ache that stirs in his chest. 

“Well then, I’m off. If anything happens…”

Nothing’s going to happen, Hoshiumi knows. Despite his loud nature, he’s always been the champion of secrecy among his kind. It’s a habit, a lesson he’s had to learn in the hardest ways imaginable. No one knows where he lives, and even if they did, it’d be a nightmare to find where exactly he lives. 

“Scream loud enough so I can find you,” Hoshiumi says finally. “If you want to keep living, that is.”

 _Don’t dissolve in thin air_ , he wants to add.

Hoshiumi shuts the door behind him, unwittingly opening Sachirou’s window of opportunity.

✧

_**iii. in the night, we're strangers** _

The brisk winter air stings his nose and lungs on the air down, but Sachirou keeps drinking it in with every orifice on his body, savoring the taste of freedom. He’s been walking through the city for miles at this point, thanking his lesser vampire status for his increased speed. 

Before he left, Sachirou drained Hoshiumi’s resources of blood to quench his thirst in the event he might run into humans on his way out. He’ll hate himself for this later. He entered the formally untouchable confines of the vampire’s personal room, opening up a treasure trove of hidden reserves.

Draining vial after vial without a care for the world, sloppily letting the red liquid drip by the sides of his mouth and coagulate, Sachirou lets himself be the monster he (sort of) is. He deserves it for holding up his walls for so long. 

It’s ironic, but the more blood Sachirou drinks the more human he feels. The more in control he feels over his mental faculties, the less he thinks about hunger. He hopes Hoshiumi will forgive him. 

He’s still thinking about Hoshiumi knowing very well that he shouldn’t. He pulls his mask up his face. Sachirou is a missing person, presumed dead. He has to avoid the company of humans.

The downside of freedom was that there were too many directions he could go, different permutations of fate. He wants to go back to his college accommodation, sink into his familiar, comfortable bed, go on his laptop and catch up what he’s missed during his time away. He can’t. It’s a no-go zone for what he’s become. His roommates were all there, human and close together, and he’s not sure how long he’ll go before he’s hungry again. 

Sachirou wonders how he’d even explain his situation to his peers, not knowing where to begin. He’s not even sure where to begin. “I almost became a vampire’s consort” sounds too much like a joke missing a punchline.

Nonetheless, he starts walking closer to familiar territory. Something deep within his subconscious stirs, begging to return to places he knows and understands for once. He finds himself in the plaza near his college, a trek that spans many hours and miles. Hoshiumi lives far away from where Sachirou comes from; he’s had to traverse several districts to get back here. 

The outdoor clock at the corner of the square reads half past midnight, its face frosted over by the cold. Sachirou’s hands and lips feel numb from hours walking through the snow in minimal clothing.

He exhales hot air into his hands like he’s breathing life into his palms, but knows he needs to find some form of shelter before hypothermia sets in. He’s still more human than monster.

He looks for somewhere still open. Somewhere as devoid as human life as possible. Sachirou narrows the list in his head, before the perfect location pops up in his head— a place he’s frequented often as a student. The library at his college has a 24 Hour Study Room, a wide, open space for students to get last-minute studying done. Even during the holiday breaks, it stayed open which Sachirou knew because he rarely went home for breaks. 

Sachirou doesn’t have his ID on him to get in, but figures there has to be at least one person there to let him in. He doesn’t expect to stay for long either; he’s just looking for a place to warm up, use the restroom, wash his face, and probably grab a map and figure out his next steps.

He gets to the glass door entrance, wrapping his fingers around the metal bar handle, shaking it gently. The fluorescent light is jarringly bright, like a hospital floor and he hears distant footsteps walking toward him. Sachirou heaves a sigh of relief, ready to thank the savior who appears before him. 

The moment Sachirou catches a glimpse of parted gray hair and a pair of dark, indifferent eyes, he knows he’s celebrated too soon, too late.

Gazing eye-level at him through the glass is none other than Miya Osamu. 

✧

Hoshiumi returns to an empty apartment. He doesn’t have a heart that beats, but he feels the phantom pains of one when it dawns on him that he’s completely alone. Again. 

The white linen sheets that used to nest Sachirou are neatly folded at the foot of the couch, a silent _thank you_ for their time together. The half-open door to his bedroom, the split lock on the ground, and the empty refrigerator that used to house a month’s supply of blood hits Hoshiumi like a wordless _fuck you_ that stops him in his tracks.

Out of all the blows they’ve changed with words and bodies, Hoshiumi found solace in the fact that Sachirou would never be strong enough to hurt him. Even other vampires couldn’t get him to bend under any form of pain, Hoshiumi had always been confident in his ability to weather it all. He’d made a habit of pain, and yet for the first time, he stands in the silence of his own making, every muscle in his body tense as it resists falling to pieces.

It’s a scene he’s too familiar with. Hoshiumi Kourai, always good at getting what he wants, but bad at keeping it. A being designed to live for all of eternity, and yet, the people he lets into his life are transient. He’s accepted that to other vampires, he’s the personification of a liminal space. A temporary rival, a reference, a passing pleasure. He can only count on himself to be there, then and now.

So how are the actions of _a human_ of all things, enough to break him?

Hoshiumi doesn’t want to spend time wallowing in this newfound emptiness. He’s gutted, but feels a desperation to fill himself up again with noise, carnage, something that reminds him that he’s powerful and in control. He leaves his apartment, running back into the night. Throwing himself into the cold, endless winter.

He wants to go wild. He wants to break free. What’s stopping him from hunting every warm body in Japan? What’s stopping him from running into someone else’s territory and giving them a taste of how it feels to lose everything? What’s stopping him from making his own company? Hoshiumi has the power to create his way out of loneliness. He’s built with ways to force people to understand.

Stopping by a house in the suburbs, Hoshiumi hears a chorus of faint, asynchronous heartbeats belonging to a sleeping family. He’s in a neighborhood with no streetlights, far from home. He’s about to give in when the faint smell of angel’s breath calls him back. 

A smell of something so pure and mesmerizing, that Hoshiumi wants to follow it to find heaven. The smell of an evening in the spring, of a boy with long, delicate fingers, cradling a broken bird in his hands, his hair spotted with _sakura_ blossoms. A scent that makes Hoshiumi’s chest ache with longing, that pulls him back into the city. Blood that he wants, down to the marrow.

✧

With nothing but a mask to conceal his identity, Sachirou understands that his chance of surviving this encounter hinges on a piece of fabric and Hoshiumi’s leftover saliva. Opening the door to the library nonchalantly with nothing so much as a greeting, Osamu nods at Sachirou like he’s welcoming his own kind. It would be too suspicious to back out, especially now, even though every cell in Sachirou’s body remembers the pain that a vampire can inflict with ill-intent.

Sachirou now knows that Hoshiumi had been earnest about protecting him. The oddly-intimate ritual of licking his wounds and reapplying his scent had granted Sachirou a second mask to hide behind, one that concealed the desirability of his blood. Osamu thinks he’s just another vampire using the facility. The gray-haired man returns to his spot in the library, propping a pen in his mouth as he pores over what Sachirou can make out as cooking books.

 _I’ll grab a map and get out of here._ Sachirou is on a timer, but doesn’t know how long it lasts. He walks into the bathroom, grimacing at the grimy state it’s been left in. 

Some things never change, he thinks, kicking aside balled up paper towels and suppressing his disgust at the smell of human waste. The lights are flickering and the mirrors have jagged cracks and graffiti, vandals etching their initials into glass with the foolish notion of being “immortalized.”

Sachirou pulls down his mask. The chill of the winter makes him several tones paler than he usually is, and his brown eyes almost look red in the dim light. He’s in dire need of a haircut, his wavy brown hair falling past his ears and curlier than ever. There’s dried blood on the corners of his lips, red to dark-black like ash that remind him of his absence of humanity. He isn’t thinking when he pools water in his hands instinctively, splashing at his face to wash away the blood, his sin.

His protection.

The lights in the bathroom flicker again, and the door to the bathroom opens faster than his eyes can track in the mirror, a second face appearing behind him.

“Curly,” Miya Osamu breathes, his eyes crazed and shining red in the mirror. He’s wearing a smile too wide for his face, his fangs sharper and whiter than his brother’s. Stretching apart and contorting his handsome, composed facial features is the pure essence of hunger. 

Sachirou’s hands, which were tightly gripping the sides of the sink, have a new pressure on top of them, Osamu’s hands. Osamu’s hands with nails that bare into his knuckles like knives. He lifts one hand up to Sachirou’s chin, lifting his head uncomfortably _upwards_ until he’s forced to look at himself in the mirror, his face cupped lovingly like the apple of Osamu’s eye. “You came home to me.”

✧

Pure adrenaline. That’s what humans still have that vampires don’t, and Sachirou’s last trump card. He’s stronger than he should be, as he wrestles his way out of Osamu’s grasp, nothing beautiful about the struggle as he claws through broken glass on his way out. 

Osamu pursues him with the fervor of an animal in heat, his red eyes glazed over with bloodlust. He’s glad that Atsumu is nowhere to be around to witness him in this state. He’s embarrassing himself. 

While Atsumu is obsessed with the hunt, Osamu is obsessed with the act of consumption. The hunt is just foreplay, that softens the body and spikes the flavor of the blood with new emotions that Osamu can’t wait to savor. Pushing his prey past ordinary stress into the new territory of fear, Osamu enters a world that his comrade Suna teasingly calls _la vie en rose._ The world is a hazy pink, and he’s in love. 

He doesn’t care how many buildings he has to smash through, how many cars he has to flip over, or how many lesser bodies he has to tear through to savor the meal he’s fixated on. Osamu’s hands are still throbbing with the feeling of Sachirou’s skin against him, so close that he can feel the blood flushing to different parts of his body like a song.

“You’ve changed!” Osamu cries out, giddy with the pursuit of an ingredient he’s dying to sample. “I almost didn’t recognize you. You’ve become even cheekier. Rosier! Who changed you? Let me speak to the chef!”

Sachirou, whose brain has been worked into a frenzy, slams into a telephone booth while he’s trying to get away. The air he’s been fighting to breathe leaves him with the first impact, his ribs cracking under the force. He’s lying in a puddle of glass shards, blood, and snow. He wants to scream, but Osamu’s hands are caressing his neck, crushing his windpipe between pinched fingers. Playing with him, fingertips boring into him like they’re massaging seasoning into meat. 

“You’re a beautiful cut,” Osamu crouches over him breathlessly. “I want to get to know you better. Spend more time with you.”

Hours ago, Sachirou was so sure that he wanted to die. He’d rather die than become someone’s pet that they refused to eat, in the way that lucky slaughterhouse animals were granted a second chance at life, but still in captivity. 

Now that death was literally breathing down his neck, in the form of an intoxicated Miya Osamu, Sachirou finds himself curiously struggling in every way he still can. He can’t stomach being consumed by someone he hated so deeply. He desires to become as inedible as possible to the man standing over him. He sees how the story ends, and wants to reject it with all of his being.

Osamu turns him over. Sachirou shuts his eyes, unwilling to stare at a butcher he feels so much loathing toward, no matter how beautiful his last sight of Earth might be, he doesn’t want it. A finger brushes over his forehead, knocking his bangs out of his eyes.

“What’s your name?” Osamu asks, lovingly. He dips a finger in Sachirou’s blood, bringing it to his lips. He traces his bottom lip, slides his finger into his mouth too slowly, and starts sucking his fingertips dry, a light noise of ecstasy escaping his parted lips.

“Why do you have to know?” Sachirou says miserably, through his clenched jaw.

“It’s for the menu, but also, so I never forget you. I want a name to this taste,” Osamu laughs softly. “It’s regal. It tastes like… everything beautiful about being human, without the aftertaste that reminds me I’m consuming a lower species. Neutralized by my brother’s venom, mottled with hints of another powerful vampire’s surrender. It tells the story of love. An aphrodisiac.”

Sachirou’s stomach crawls with the description of his own blood, cursing at how it’s betrayed him in every way possible. He thinks about Hoshiumi again, guilt surging through his veins. “Hoshiumi Kourai didn’t surrender to me,” he mutters through gritted teeth.

Osamu crushes his boot into Sachirou’s head, grinding him into the ground. Tenderizing his meat. 

“Don’t tell me he’s already soiled my meal,” he growls agitatedly, before raising an eyebrow. “I’m not sure how you played Hoshiumi Kourai, but it’s not going to work on me. You know, he’s not the type to do things like this. He’s a power-hungry little shit who doesn’t know what love is.”

_I know._

“So tell me, love. What’s that name?”

✧

Hoshiumi Kourai has a terrible secret. It lives in the confines of his body, trapped behind bones and skin, like a prisoner that might escape if he so much as sleeps. It’s a tale reminiscent of torment, one that brinks him to the brink of humanity and back, that burns him when he flies too close. It’s the very story of love, of the boundary between consumption and fear. Of discipline and repression like thin ice spread over a river of regret. Indulgence on one face of the coin, with consequence on the other side.

The faint smell is no longer a light brush against his nostrils, but a torrential downpour. It happens so fast. One moment, Hoshiumi is mid-air, ready to give in to the madness that comes with being alone, the rage of being left behind. There’s a tiny beat in between motions, where that angel’s breath in the air explodes into a bloom that fills Hoshiumi with fear, that stops him in his tracks and forces him to take off in another direction, sprinting through the winter landscape as fast as light. 

He’s scared. The weakness that he’s known his entire life rears its ugly head before him like a serpent, challenging him to move in spite of that fear. He runs through illusions, he lets the fear wash over him, grip his heart, drive him forward. He’s afraid of what this reaction means, he fears what he’ll see when he gets to the end of the rainbow, he fears losing control, and he fears the name that’s brimming at the base of his throat. Threatening to burst out of his mouth with every step. A name he pretends not to know, out of salvation.

Hoshiumi isn’t prepared for the scene that he arrives at, following his senses to the final destination. He appears like an unwelcome spectre of the night, a disruptive light that blinds all the go-ers to a candlelit dinner when he sees him.

The person he dreams of eating, the person he dreams of loving, the person who’s there and not there, who belongs to another world he can’t reach, spread out on the ground like someone else’s offering on a bed of broken glass and snow. Beaten and broken. And once Hoshiumi sees him like that, he steps past a threshold without any intentions of coming back.

It’s the first time that the name escapes Hoshiumi’s lungs, and he screams it like it’s the last.

**_“SACHIROU!”_ **

##  **Interlude: Nurture**

Hoshiumi Kourai is born on a spring day in April, missing the fixings of a healthy newborn baby. His heart doesn’t beat. His skin is porcelain instead of red, like he’s stillborn. But he cries— he cries so loudly that it’s infectious, and his mother who births him alone in the basement of her home cries along with him. 

She cries because she knows— and he will come to know— he’s been born in between worlds. Her small child, who’s come too early like a surprise cherry blossom in the winter, will grow up to find out he doesn’t belong in either of them. 

For now, he belongs in her arms, nestled against her bare breast, a cradle of love in a harsh world.

❀

Kourai rejects his human mother’s milk, just as Akitomo before him. His mother Asa knows she’s raising another vampire, alone. She doesn’t even have time to curse their father, who she never wants to see again even if he were to re-appear, because she doesn’t think he deserves to see these beautiful children, or feel the warmth of their innocent love.

She works late nights at the local hospital, into ungodly hours of the night where she’s alone to rob the blood bank, asking for god’s forgiveness every time. Her children are hungry, and this is the only food that they’ll accept. She fills the lime-green sippy cup with Kourai’s name in it with blood, and he laughs— the sweetest sound that Asa clings onto like a prayer— his cheeks stained with red, smelling of rust. 

Kourai is happy, too young to know about his place in the world or his mother’s struggle. And if Asa can stop time, she wants to so that he’ll never learn.

❀

The first time Kourai learns he’s different, it happens without Asa’s notice. She’s always been careful about what she shows the boys; she’s a woman who still vividly remembers how it was like to be a child, and knows what stirs the imagination. He flips through a page of a picture book, to see a group of children frolicking on a playground on a sunny summer day. He notices dark smudges around them, like dark after-images. He wonders if the book has been stained, but a fine print label calls them _shadows._ Kourai looks up to Akitomo, who sits by the window.

Akitomo doesn’t have a shadow. 

Neither does he.

❀

The older Kourai gets, the more he starts to question the world he lives in. Why he and Akitomo only know each other, why his mother eats her meals separately from them, and why he can never go outside. Her only company comes in the form of birds that come to roost around the makeshift feeder she’s built out of stray materials. _These are the only friends I need, Kourai_ , she giggles, holding a young flycatcher she’s been nursing that’s fallen out of a nest.

She breathes life into her hands, and when she opens her fingers, the bird takes to the sky again. Free, while she stays on the ground.

Kourai starts becoming aware of his mother’s struggles— stretching herself thin across work, raising her young, and playing so many different roles to cover what they’re missing. Provider. Teacher. Friend.

Pausing over his workbook at the black-and-white icon of a woman called “Mother”, Kourai writes two words to describe his own. Beautiful and lonely. He stops and adds a third one. 

Love.

❀

Hoshiumi Asa kneels down before her two sons, who watch her with wide, reproachful eyes. She’s nervous, but smiling, taking their small hands into her own. “Kourai. Akitomo,” she says, her eyes shining. She seems excited to break the news. “Mama has been seeing someone new lately, and I want to introduce her to you.”

Kourai and Akitomo exchange excited glances. They’ve never had visitors over to the house before, and start filling the air with questions. _Will she like us? What’s her name? Is she going to be our mother, too? Tell us, tell us!_

Asa squeezes her childrens’ hands, wishing she could preserve their innocence longer. But this is a test for not only her, but all of them together, as a family. “But before I introduce her to the family, there’s some things we need to go over. Something that I should have told you both years ago.”

Mother and children take a seat. Asa knows in her heart that this will be a hard one. Akitomo, the quieter and more shrewd of the two, seems to know what’s about to come next. He’s had his suspicions over his identity for longer than Kourai has. She takes a deep breath. “When she comes over, we’ll have to change a lot of things around here. You see, she’s different from you two. I’m different from you two, even though we are all family.”

At seven years old, Kourai learns what a vampire is. He learns he is different, and his life changes forever in ways that he can’t take back.

❀

Asa gets married in an intimate backyard ceremony in an idyllic garden, her eyes brighter than Kourai has ever seen them, he thinks as he flips through pictures. He experiences her big day through pictures only, being told gently that he and Akitomo, despite being the biggest parts of her life, could not partake in her big day. _It’s too dangerous_ , she tells them.

 _They’re too sickly_ , Asa explained to everyone else who stumbled over the knowledge that she had children.

Kourai and Akitomo now have a stepmother, a lovely woman named Hitomi who plays piano at a local church. She’s been given a series of half-truths to explain their existence, skirting over the fact that Asa’s children are inhuman and immortal, their vampire side completely masking any traits of humanity. Hitomi gushes over the fact that Asa’s children are so gorgeous, they look like angels that came from heaven.

_Mother isn’t lonely anymore._

They live together, a family of four for the first time, with Asa keeping a veil of secrecy that’s held together by strict feeding times and total obedience from her children. Akitomo forces human food down easily, none of it contributing to quenching his thirst or hunger, while Kourai grimaces at every plate in front of him. 

_It’s not enough._

_Not enough blood._

_Not enough of Mother’s love._

Kourai can’t hold down his starvation anymore. One night, he crawls out of his room, and opens the section of the fridge that is locked away from Hitomi. He snaps the lock in two with his fingers, poring through the pouches of blood. He doesn’t know how his mother usually preps them, so he tears the bag apart with his hands, spraying his face with blood. His hands, his clothes, his faces, all covered in blood. He sucks and laps desperately, his mind and body exhausted from playing human, when he looks up to see a pair of terrified eyes stare back at him.

Hitomi screams. Her piercing cry rings through the house, and the veil falls. Kourai, scared out of his mind of what this means for his mother, attacks out of fear. 

❀

Love is what makes Asa choose her family over her own sake. Love is why Asa takes the boys and runs, leaving her entire life behind in their childhood home, knowing full well what it looks like. The newspapers will call her a murderer, everything she’s worked hard to build will fall to pieces, and Kourai can’t help but shoulder the blame that Asa tries to take on herself. 

Akitomo won’t talk to him. The only time they talk is when Akitomo goes out hunting, alone, and brings back a ration of blood from sources he never elaborates on. “Is it enough?” No one calls Asa “Asa” anymore. She has a litany of different names and identities, and they move from encampment to encampment.

His mother is lonelier than ever, and it’s as if she smiles even wider to fight it. “It’s my fault, Kourai,” she whispers, holding him close. Stopping him from crying. “Your mother was selfish with love.”

Each word breaks Kourai’s heart. He wants to tear open his chest, pull out his useless, vestigial heart, and find out why it still hurts even though it doesn’t work. He can’t even hurt himself with this body. His skin is thicker than his teeth. He regenerates his wounds as fast as he can inflict them. Vampire. He hates that word. He wants to spit it out. _What’s there to be proud of,_ he thinks, watching his mother struggle to keep up with him and his brother as they run from angry shop owners after looting. _What’s there to love,_ he thinks as he imagines Asa’s life with human children, her smile so bright that it hurts. Then, an idea dawns on him.

There’s no way to turn Akitomo and him into humans. But there’s a way to make Asa a vampire.

He loves his mother more than anything in the whole world.

She loves him. He is her world.

He bites her.

❀

Asa wakes up, red-eyed and driven insane by hunger. Akitomo can’t hold her back, and Kourai is paralyzed by the shock of being attacked by his own mother. They catch up to her, but it’s too late. Kourai gapes in horror at what remains of an innocent family camping by a lake, whose only crime was being too close to a newborn vampire. Kourai’s love tears apart two families that day.

Before he can reunite with his mother, he’s stopped in his tracks by two vampires that restrain his brother and him. A pair of twins. Miya Osamu and Miya Atsumu, who watch him with cold eyes, dismissing him as a “lesser vampire”, babied by the nurture of humans, most likely. 

A third vampire with cold eyes, silver hair tipped with black like barbs, appears out of the shadows, taking Kourai’s beloved mother with him. She had broken the rules in his domain. The transformation and aftermath has rendered her mute, and she’s lost her mind. Kourai screams that it’s his fault, and that she didn’t know any better, but it falls to deaf ears.

Kita Shinsuke warns him that unless Kourai wants to suffer a fate that renders his mother’s efforts futile, he has to follow the rules. Live in obscurity. Feed sparingly. Dispose of his prey properly. He disappears with his cohort, leaving Kourai with the ruins he’s created. 

Akitomo leaves Japan. He can’t look at Kourai without blame in his eyes.

Kourai never lets anyone call him by his given name. He can’t trust they’ll be there the next day.

❀

Hoshiumi is all alone.

He hates himself. He hates the body that he’s in, and masks that self-hatred with pride. He indulges that self-hatred by making his body stronger, physically punishing and pushing the limits of the vessel of his soul. He gets leaner, his muscles get harder, and he’s emptier.

He meets other vampires. He learns they’re a bloodthirsty, power-hungry race that sees humans as a weaker species meant for feeding. The way humans would describe livestock, with no emotional attachment. 

With no other company at his disposal and a refusal to ever transform another human again, Hoshiumi lets himself get used by other vampires in the only way he can offer— carnal pleasure, the language of predators— in exchange for secrets, alliances, mutually beneficial rivalries. There’s Hinata Shouyou, fiery and orange, loved by everyone, with power in numbers. There’s Ushijima Wakatoshi, who possesses enough raw strength to bring anyone to their knees. Countless others.

They don’t love him. They have a whole world outside of Hoshiumi. He doesn’t love them. He doesn’t want to live in anyone else’s world. He can’t exist without them either, they’ve made him who he is. He becomes Hoshiumi Kourai, strong on his own. Never lost in a crowd.

He’s so empty at this point, that he no longer sees Asa when he looks at his reflection in mirrors. He can’t find his mother, or the love that used to be a monster’s saving grace. 

And yet, even at the points where he hates himself so much that it threatens to consume him, he can’t take out that anger on humans. The humans that Hoshiumi picks for consumption are city-dwellers that can only be described as the bottom of the barrel. Their blood is so foul, it punishes Hoshiumi for being a vampire. It’s how he likes it. He grows to hate people like Miya Osamu who eat for pleasure. There should be no pleasure associated with reaping the innocent. 

Hoshiumi’s comforts are the human stories and movies he was raised with. He’s defensive over this hobby, lashing out at anyone who might suggest he’s that kind of person. Through movies, he lives new lives. He learns what high school is, he learns that people his age would go to college, he feels giddy when he watches people fall in love, without the pretense of power or exchanges. 

Though love has only hurt him in this life, he still entertains it in the recesses of his mind. He wonders what sport he’d play. He wonders what kind of boy would love him back. He even steals some DVDs from an adult store, realizing that for sure, he likes a certain type of guy. He’s never had a neighbor, but he knows he’d be smitten with one of those boy-next-door types in another life, wishing he knew the feeling of teen blush on his cheeks. (Vampires don’t blush.)

All of this makes him feel worse about killing humans.

Hoshiumi starts watching humans. He’s fascinated by nightlife, and when he’s full and daring, he watches people go about their day in the afternoon. He lives vicariously through the college-aged boys running to class and one day, takes a seat in an empty train. 

In the springtime, around his birthday, he lounges in a blossoming cherry tree, watching people precess into the city night like a school of fish. He’s fed recently, so all of the humans smell the same to him. Being raised with a human mother gives Hoshiumi an edge over controlling his thirst unlike all the other vampires he knows. 

Hoshiumi leans back against the branches, his eyes following a group of students on their way to a festival when his attention is stolen away by a boy who walks past his tree. His ears perk up to take in the softest laughter he’s ever heard, the tinkling of bells, as the boy separates from his friends and segways down a path of his own.

Hoshiumi’s eyes widen as the scent hits him first. It’s the most delicious thing he’s ever smelled, his mouth starting to water ungraciously as he starts blindly moving through the trees to follow the scent. He’s gone from not hungry at all to absolutely starving, his mind racing with his feet as he rounds the corner, silently tailing the tall boy with soft brown hair, lost in the wind. 

He no longer cares about his morals, cast to the side like shed skin or the code of vampires he has to uphold. Not with something like this. He can’t wait. He can’t hold back. He’s reached a point where thirst isn’t enough to capture the lust that overtakes him.

As the boy crouches before something in his path, Hoshiumi coils up like a spring, ready to lunge at this boy with everything he has, when he’s stopped by the most tender voice that evokes emotions in him he’s thought he’s lost.

“You must be scared, aren’t you? That’s why you’re beating your wings against me like this. Don’t worry. You’re safe with me now. I’ll take care of you.”

Hoshiumi freezes in his tracks like a deer in the lights, even though he’s managed to stay completely unnoticed. The boy stands up, he’s taller than Hoshiumi assumed he’d be. Softer than his hair are his eyes, framed with delicate light-brown eyelashes. His fingers are long and dexterous, and Hoshiumi sees something with small wings flutter within them. A broken bird. He has petals in his hair from walking under the cherry blossoms, and Hoshiumi thinks—

Thinks he sees Asa again for a moment, her hands curled up around an injured flycatcher, breathing life into its broken wings with her lovely voice. 

Thinks that he must truly be a monster, to want to brutalize something… _someone_ so kind.

“Is someone there?” the boy asks.

Hoshiumi bolts into the night, not daring to looking back. 

❀

The highlight of Hoshiumi’s days is following Hirugami Sachirou on his solitary walks through the city. Sachirou doesn’t know how dangerous it is to walk alone at bizarre times in the evening, trespassing countless invisible feeding grounds that only Hoshiumi and other vampires can see. It’s almost as if he’s possessed, drifting through the city in a way that makes Hoshiumi wonder if he’s as lonely as he is, but in a different way. 

There are times Hoshiumi imagines different circumstances where he was Sachirou’s friend. He imagines running up to him, grabbing him by his backpack, and shaking him out of whatever reverie he was in that possessed him to walk out like that. Hoshiumi becomes Sachirou’s silent guardian angel, ambushing any vampire that dares go after him. 

He’s resigned to the fact that even if they were made for each other, they’re never fated to meet in the way that wolves never befriend lambs. It’s a love that can never be given back, as he knows consummating it is equivalent to consumption. Sachirou is the lamb-he-doesn’t-eat, the essence of vulnerability that he swears to protect. He keeps his distance until the day he can’t anymore.

Hoshiumi Kourai falls backwards into a ring of fire for a human that he barely knows.


	2. Part II: Habit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> love that blooms in purgatory between the wolf and the lamb-it-won't consume

_**i. under the blood moon, i'll find you** _

The night is red. Hoshiumi hates the color red; it’s the color he’s the most familiar with as he sees it in his sustenance, in his eyes, and the nightmares he has when he’s awake. The color of extremes. A warning in nature. Passion and love. Violence, strength, and power. There’s nothing soft about the color red, and though his fight is bloodless, he leaves red everywhere.

With his hands, Hoshiumi drags Osamu through hell alive. The stars become eyes that keep finding him, dragging him back into Hoshiumi’s red domain. The moon is red, like Hoshiumi’s eyes that carry all of the anger and ferocity of someone who has only known carnage. Osamu hasn’t cried in pain like this since the first day he was reborn as a vampire. He cries for his brother, unsure if it will be his last breath, when the strike he braces himself from never comes.

“Hoshiumi.”

Hoshiumi freezes. He feels a hand on his shoulder.

“Hoshiumi, that’s enough.”

Hoshiumi is frozen in shock, and Osamu sees the color recede in his eyes. A chance to escape, that the wounded vampire takes like a blessing, crawling away on his hands and knees.

Sachirou is too weak to stand. He’s on the verge of collapse, and the pain is so agonizing he’s biting down on his own mask, his bones shattered into pieces. And yet, he knows he has to get to Hoshiumi, who called his name for the first time. 

“Thank goodness,” Sachirou laughs so quietly, because his lungs filled with blood can barely manage a whisper. He feels so faint, but when Hoshiumi’s shaking eyes find his, he feels accomplished. “You’re still there.”

Sachirou falls forward, and Hoshiumi catches him in his arms in a daze. He’s never let an enemy go before, and knows that he’s probably incurred the wrath of a much higher power from what he’s done. Osamu’s comrades will make the future hell for him. He’s gone against his own kind, to protect the interests of someone who is more human than vampire. 

Hoshiumi hasn’t just broken the rules, he’s smashed them, made a fool of them. And for a human that left him, no less.

Sachirou is warm in his arms. Heavy. His head lolls around like he’s a child, no composure to keep it up anymore. Hoshiumi imagines this is how a baby feels like, though he’s never held one before. Soft. Fragile. Eyes closed to the terrible world around them, in a blissful slumber.

Hoshiumi carries Sachirou through the frozen winter night, like he’s carrying a bride he intends on burying. The icy, white snow falls from the sky, resting on Sachirou’s eyelashes and hair like petals from spring blossoms, like the first time Hoshiumi saw him.  _ Beautiful and lonely _ , Hoshiumi traces those words with his tongue. Like Asa. Not meant to be touched by someone like him, or else they’ll find themselves in the situation they’re in now. He caresses Sachirou’s face over and over again, like a series of apologies, before he stops.

“Do you even want to go home with me?” Hoshiumi asks out loud with his whole chest. 

He stares up into the night sky, wishing that he could have some guidance because even though he knows the way back, he feels so lost. He’s never felt closer to Asa in such a long time. “Have I been selfish with love, too?”

He feels Sachirou’s hand pull at the collar of his ripped shirt, almost unconsciously. His fingers are so cold, and it startles him.  _ Oh God, _ Hoshiumi shrinks back.  _ Did you hear any of that? _

“Hoshiumi…” Sachirou’s voice is drawl, quieter than a whisper. Strained and rasping, coughing so hard that Hoshiumi stops walking and crouches in the snow, afraid he might lose him. 

“Hoshiumi, do you hate me?”

It’s not a question that Hoshiumi expects.

“Hate you? Why would I?” Hoshiumi replies gruffly, putting a hand under Sachirou’s head to steady him.  _ Please don’t choke. _

“For leaving you.”

Hoshiumi stops, averting his gaze away from Sachirou’s half-open, hazy brown eyes that feel like they’re searching him for something. The wounds of abandonment are still fresh, phantom pains from a heart he doesn’t have. The solitude that was enough to rewind back time that he was running from. How it was enough to get him to revert to his old ways, even for a passing minute. 

He remembers that, and is shocked by the absence of anger. He was sad, no doubt, but resigned. If he was angry at all, it was at himself for creating a realm where he was the only constant; where everyone he loved fell to the curse of impermanence. He blamed his weakness.

He’s not angry at Sachirou. In fact, he can’t remember an instance where he was ever.

“I thought I would be. But I’m not. If I were you, I’d want to leave too.”

Sachirou smiles weakly. His guilt remains.

“Let’s go home then, Hoshiumi.”

_ Home.  _ Hoshiumi’s eyes become a pair of crimson orbs when he hears the word “home.” It’s a word he hasn’t heard for so many years, a word that falls on his ears like something he’s waited to hear for so long. He doesn’t even call his own apartment “home.” He hasn’t felt so warm in so long. Warmth at the end of a long winter.

“Please,” Hoshiumi says, rising from the snow and looking down softly at the boy in his arms, who’s larger than he is by a magnitude and yet so small. “You can call me Kourai.”

_ A bright name for a monster. _

❈

When Hoshiumi loves, he leaves a mess in his wake. It’s a curse that never leaves, that follows him because he  _ feels  _ emotions so strongly and intensely that he knows someday it’ll be his ruin. 

When the sun comes up, and Sachirou is lying across his lap, Hoshiumi knows that he’s going to be stuck indoors at night for a long time. He’s thankful for his foresight, making stops at several blood banks that will surely report a robbery in the morning; breaking more rules than he can count without a second thought. He knows that he’s doomed to face Kita Shinsuke again, but for the time being, he’s safe thanks to his years of secrecy.

No one knows where to find him. He’s never been close to anyone enough to tell them.

Hoshiumi glances down at Sachirou sleeping on his lap, the man’s bruised, but rosy cheek pressed against Hoshiumi’s thigh and smiling peacefully, and something stirs within him. Hoshiumi brushes his fingers over chestnut brown locks of hair, running his fingers through them and suddenly, all of those worries fall away. He’d braced himself for the restless and annoyance that he expected to feel at the prospect of losing his nighttime outings. 

But the feeling isn’t there. Just like how he expected to be angry. For a creature of habit, Hoshiumi is startled to find himself unpredictable as of late. Something is blooming within him, and he’s not sure how it’s going to change him.

The ever-moving ocean is fine with being still for someone else’s sake. Running his hand through soft, brown currents, Hoshiumi realizes why he has no desire to go outside.

Everything he wants is at his fingertips. He just has to wait and see if he’s wanted in return.

❈

“I want to try something with you.”

Hoshiumi holds Sachirou’s arm in his hands, eyes tracing the veins that span from his wrist down to his elbow, where they disappear under skin, flesh, fat, and bone. Hunger tears at the base of his throat, radiating from his stomach, but it’s silenced by his desire to prove to himself that he’s mastered the repression of his worst traits. 

“Do you trust me?”

Sachirou nods. Wordless acceptance. The world has thrust his life in Hoshiumi’s hands for better or for worse, and he doesn’t fight it. He doesn’t want to fight it anymore. This could be a mistake that kills him. He doesn’t care.

Holding his breath, Hoshiumi brings his lips to Sachirou’s skin, dropping his eyes to meet his point of contact. His mouth is wet, his teeth retracted as far back as he can, as he breathes in Sachirou’s essence, sucking at exposed skin harder and harder, until he can feel the hotness of blood rising up to meet him. Close to breaking skin. He stops there, to savor how it feels to be at the brink of indulgence. Sachirou’s skin is a thin membrane between existence and non-existence, madness and self-preservation.

The act gauges if the emotions Hoshiumi feels are stronger than the nature he mindlessly follows. His best matched up against his worst.

_ One minute. Three. Five. _

Hoshiumi resurfaces, his eyes full of stars. He pulls back. He detaches himself from what he wants to consume more than anything in the world, he feels nothing but relief, gazing back at Sachirou who starts inspecting the purple-blue welt on his arm. The first link on the chain breaks; the metallic taste of freedom on Hoshiumi’s tongue.

Sachirou laughs. Faint, but relieved, the kind of laugh that echoes his awareness over how he very well could have died during that exchange. “I think I’ll sleep a little easier tonight,” he says.

This is just the first of many trials, he knows.

Hoshiumi’s chest expands, the air a mixture of relief and pride. “I’ll work my way up your body slowly, then. Once I get to your neck, we’ll really know,” he stops, a finger pressed to his bottom lip. He still tastes Sachirou everywhere. “Know if I’ve become strong enough to overcome my own hunger.”

Sachirou folds his hands over his lap. “Isn’t that exciting, Kourai-kun?”  _ No one has ever called Hoshiumi that. He’d never let them even if they wanted to. Sachirou doesn’t know this. _ “It means when all of this blows over, you’ll get to go out during the daytime. See more people. Watch humans even closer.” 

“Yeah,” Hoshiumi replies. He opens his mouth, but closes it, omitting the part where he corrects Sachirou.  _ Get closer to you. Win your trust completely. _

❈

When Sachirou looks at his body, he sees an endless series of cages. His name is a cage, a story that his parents wrote for him like a recipe he was expected to follow. His face is a cage, and he knows every part of it so intimately that he can shield himself by moving a muscle a certain way or convey an image that doesn’t align with what he feels. His mind, attached to his feelings, is the strongest cage of all, designed to protect people from getting too close to him while stopping him from unconsciously reaching out to pull people in with him.

He practices a ritual of detachment, not because it’s a habit to him, but rather, a lesson he’s had to learn from being so hopelessly attached that it ruins him. Because if he’s not careful, the seeds of fondness get planted all over his body and live under his skin. Sachirou doesn’t even know they exist until the blooms explode out of him— vines, not flowers, that root him down to a place he can’t escape, taking others with him. 

It’s why he’s stayed in unhappy situations so long. He tolerates, forgiving too easily because he feels loyal to what he blooms for. Vines choke his body, bondage that imprints the shape of knots on his bare skin.

Vines of filial piety rooting him in place to a destiny that he hated, that made him stand still to take every blow like an obedient child. Vines that forced him to stand, watch, and love as his mother set fire to her own nest, for the sake of teaching him how burns feel like. Vines that rooted him to boys who told him that they could rewrite the twisted definition of “love” he was conditioned to believe in, only to trap him in another habit.

Sachirou doesn’t know if he’s being held down or not, a silhouette by the sunset, when Hoshiumi reaches out for him. He’s lost count of how many times they’ve repeated this action, to the point each session bleeds into the other. The same feeling. But today, Hoshiumi’s touch is gentler, peeling back the layer of fabric around Sachirou’s neck. 

“To protect you,” Hoshiumi whispers, fully knowing Sachirou knows what this is. They do it every day. He’s saying it to convince himself, or maybe both of them.

Hoshiumi leans in, parting his mouth. The motions of a kiss despite being the opposite of one. The marks he’s left on Sachirou’s body have creeped up to his collarbones, where they’ll meet their inevitable end at the place where Hoshiumi’s lips touch his neck. 

There’s something different today that makes Sachirou forget he is a cage. He wants Hoshiumi to absorb him, he wants them to be the same person with the same breath, no spaces. 

_ I like you, Kourai. I want you. I shouldn’t. _

The place where Hoshiumi’s tongue touches his neck burns, and Sachirou knows it’s too late. The moon outside the window is red tonight. A partial-eclipse. He watches it all night, reconstructing his cage quietly while Hoshiumi exists in his own room. Were the walls always so thin?

❈

_**ii. love is what you can't consume** _

A door opens. 

Hoshiumi crosses the threshold between his bedroom and the living room, his face worked up as he searches in the dark. He hesitates, the name feeling unnecessarily heavy on his tongue. He’s wanted to say it so bad, but hates any act of surrender.

“Sachirou, are you awake?”

Hoshiumi wants to strangle himself. He’s asked Sachirou to do so much before, leaning and breathing over him more times than he can count, and yet now, he’s gripped with the feeling he might be asking too much.

Sachirou pulls the blankets up to his face. He can’t sleep either. “Barely,” he lies. “You caught me right before I crossed the bridge to the other side.”

_ What the hell is going on? _

In all of his years of living, Hoshiumi has never played a game like this. Vampires are usually straightforward with their wants or desires, never hesitating to pursue their innate needs. He’s only consorted with his own kind, beings who can understand him in a way no one else can. Where he’s a monster facing another monster, of equal measure, entangling his hands and fangs into a being that takes what he gives them. That he can sink into without fear of consuming or being consumed. That’s absent of the fear he associates with loving that he associates with losing.

But Sachirou is nothing but foreign territory. Forbidden, with signs all around it that say “do not enter.” It’s what he can’t have that drives him insane.

“Well, if you can’t sleep,” Hoshiumi says hastily, leaning against his door frame, curling his sharp nails against the wood.  _ Why is this harder than sex? _ He’s never been one to hesitate before, always so forthcoming with his desires when it comes to dealing with his own kind. “Do you want to watch a movie with me?”  _ In my room. _

_ Where no one has ever been before. _

_ I’ve been in a lot of people’s rooms though. _

_ They keep inviting me back, too. _

_ Kourai, he’s going to push you away if you keep talking like that. _

_ Don’t say anything. _

Sachirou pauses, weighing Hoshiumi’s offer in his head. He shrugs out of his mound of blankets on the couch, getting to his feet. “I guess I could,” he says, hesitating. He has his own secrets to protect.

He hopes whatever seeds Hoshiumi’s planted throughout his body never bloom. And if they bloom, he doesn’t want to see flowers. Not in a place like this.

❈

Hoshiumi isn’t used to watching movies with other people. Feeling a weight on the opposite side of the bed that gets chattier every night. Sachirou fills the space with pleasant laughter and quiet, smart-alecky comments that rile Hoshiumi up as he defends his tastes. He’s become too bold, spreading out over the barely used covers, blissfully ignoring that he’s in the company of his natural-born predator.

“ _ Heavenly Forest _ , hm. I wouldn’t have taken you as the kind of guy to like romantic dramas. Do you want to be Makoto-san?” Sachirou lets out a giggle that infuriates Hoshiumi. The boy with brown hair and even deeper brown eyes perches his face against his hands as Hoshiumi sits cross-legged on the bed, averting his gaze.  _ Facetious.  _

“You’re not taking this seriously,” Hoshiumi shoots back, pushing Sachirou’s face from its precipice with his foot. He wears his socks to bed, black like the turtleneck he wears. If he didn’t have company, he’d prefer to be completely naked in his own room. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking, letting a lesser-vampire-who’s-basically-human into his lair and into his mind.

“You do, don’t you. Are you going to replace me with a more exciting piece of meat once I get too boring and reliable?” Sachirou knows he’s being annoying. It’s the same annoying that gets the best reaction out of his friends. Controlling his own alienation.

“No,” Hoshiumi says flatly, crossing his arms. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s being made fun of, that Sachirou is setting up a boundary between them on the bed by acting so frivolous when he’s not, and it makes him seethe.  _ That’s not even the point of the plot.  _ “Which one of the girls do you think you are?”

Sachirou sits up, his posture and expression more serious. He leans against the backboard of the bed and stares past the screen, taking a deep breath. “I’ve read the book,” he says.  _ I hate it, too.  _ “Which one do you want me to be?”

“None of them,” Hoshiumi snaps, bewildered by Sachirou’s puzzling reaction.  _ Forget it. _

“I thought so. Now let’s just focus on the lovely scenery of the Japanese countryside in the background,” Sachirou says too-cheerfully, crossing his legs and leaning back. There’s a space between where their hands rest that spans only a few inches. An illusion that they’re close, when they couldn’t be farther apart than a human on earth looking at a celestial body of stars. 

Sachirou can figure out someone like Hoshiumi Kourai. Work with him, take him apart, and understand him despite the fact that he’s dealing with a more biologically complex being. But he knows deep down, Hoshiumi doesn’t know him. 

❈

On the third day, Sachirou falls asleep during the movie they’re watching. 

Hoshiumi doesn’t know how it’s possible, because the last time he checked, Sachirou was upright. Nothing but walls, a prey animal masking its vulnerability in a predator’s domain. His words brush away fingers that inch closer to him. Hoshiumi doesn’t encroach his space, not wanting to repeat past mistakes. Never making a move outside of necessary rituals. Hoshiumi wants Sachirou to exist in peace more than he wants him.

_ Wants him. _ Hoshiumi knows it’s how he feels, but doesn’t know what it means. Want to consume him? Want to sleep with him? He doesn’t even know if there’s a difference between love and consumption, when it comes to matters with wolves and lambs. The love of a wolf shouldn’t be requited anyways; it spells the doom of the lamb. Or something like that.

Sachirou is all defense, and at some point, Hoshiumi wonders if it’s physically exhausting to  _ be like that. _ He gets his answer when Sachirou collapses, a sleeping mess beside him, face pressed up against a pillow.  _ How can something so cunning look so innocent as he sleeps? _

He sleeps so quietly that Hoshiumi doesn’t notice until he tears his gaze from the screen to see Sachirou’s reaction to something that happens in the movie, only to see him stirring by his side. He’s curled up, his neck involuntarily exposed, his collared shirt buttoned down so far that Hoshiumi can see the line of his chest. 

Hoshiumi swallows. The glands in his mouth start pumping out venom, almost to prepare himself for what’s to happen next. He can’t retract his fangs, which emerge like prongs at the sides of his lips. Knives, churning with poison that’s acrid against his tongue, a taste that can only be purged by the sweetness of blood. 

_ I want… _ Hoshiumi’s mouth floods with saliva. His hand stretches out. If anyone deserves what lies in front of him, it’s him. 

Not Atsumu, Osamu, or the other vampires he’s struck down like an assassin in the night. He’s been patient enough. He’s saved Sachirou from even crueler deaths. He’s softened him, shown him kindness that he’s never bared in front of anyone else. They’re trapped in a cycle of phantom touches, Hoshiumi making no progress with even befriending his prey.  _ Nothing can stop me _ . He breathes heavily, his neck is a spring that’s about to snap—

When he feels something warm touch him, in the space between where his shirt meets his pants. An open area, he feels it against his hip, touching him, searching him. Sachirou’s hand. Hoshiumi shrinks, guilt washing over him. Horrified he’d let his thirst mangle his thoughts.

“Kourai-kun,” Sachirou whispers sleepily. He’s still unconscious. Hoshiumi has heard him talk in his sleep before, words he usually can’t make out that he’d rather not know. Too private. A sleepy, sheepish grin spreads on Sachirou’s face that Hoshiumi hasn’t seen before. “I like you.”

And just like that, everything that makes up Hoshiumi breaks.

❈

Sachirou doesn’t remember falling asleep. He wakes up in Hoshiumi’s bed, tucked in carefully like a wrapped present; he hasn’t woken up like this since he was five years old, still loved, still innocent without a sense of self. He shudders at the image he wants to un-remember. He picks the blanket off him gingerly when he hears a rustling in the kitchen. Plastic grocery bags?

It’s dark outside. Sachirou lives the inverted schedule of a vampire, moon to moon. He walks out to the kitchen to find Hoshiumi standing like a statue, dressed in a tight-fitting black shirt and beige trousers. He’s extremely under-dressed for the winter, one degree away from nakedness. It dawns on Sachirou that Hoshiumi has made more of a conscious effort to be dressed lately, a departure from the immodesty he was proud to behold at their first meetings.

“Kourai-kun,” Sachirou’s voice sends a ripple through the silence. “Did you go outside?”

Hoshiumi cocks an eyebrow. He speaks under his breath, averting his gaze away from Sachirou. “Yeah.”

_ You shouldn’t _ , Sachirou wants to say, but he stops his lips from moving. Stops himself from worrying for a bygone, or at least saying out loud that he’s afraid of losing someone.

“You know, I was thinking about something. If I don’t come home one day, then this place is all yours. Wouldn’t that be nice?” Hoshiumi says under his breath. He slides his own hand down his hip, gripping where Sachirou’s hand had been a night before. Not that Sachirou knows it was there ever, or that he’d betrayed himself while half-asleep. 

“You won’t have to use all of your energy to push me away anymore.”

The air between them stills. They’ve been chipping away at each other since the day Hoshiumi brought him back from the brink of death, reluctant to fall forward even as their bases erode away, waiting to see who falls first. When Sachirou pulls back, it’s like Hoshiumi bites the air he’s left behind, seconds too late.

“That’s a nice offer, Kourai-kun, but it sounds like a boring life to me,” Sachirou replies. Sweet, with a drawl at the end of his sentences. Hoshiumi knows that voice too well, and it’s not the sweetness he’s looking for.  _ You’re not supposed to admit to it. _

“Well, I won’t be going outside again,” Hoshiumi says, sitting down at the table, folding his hands. He’s bothered, his restless leg beating against the chair in a steady rhythm. “I ran into another vampire tonight while doing some reconnaissance to scope out what we’re up against.”

Sachirou’s stomach turns. Hoshiumi hears the shift in his heartbeat. “Don’t worry, it was an ally of mine. Anyways, I’ve confirmed that I’m in big trouble.”

Hoshiumi leans back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. He’s contemplating all of the decisions he’s made up to this very moment, the weight of consequence settling on his shoulders. “Big, big trouble,” he mutters.  _ All because of you. _

Hoshiumi puts up a finger, swirling the air in front of him absentmindedly.

“I almost killed another vampire. Not just any vampire, but a vampire that I’d previously stolen from. It’s like, horrible vampire etiquette to steal a hunt off someone else’s feeding grounds. It’s a serious crime to attack another one of your kind, especially if you’re on good terms with their coven. It’s like I’ve spat on their entire clan. I’ve really,  _ really  _ fucked up.”

Another finger goes up, much to Sachirou’s alarm. 

“Also, since I figured they’d come looking for me, I knew we’d have to bunker up here and lay low. I robbed a blood bank on our way home. That’s another strike. See, it’s extremely suspicious for anyone to steal that much blood. We’re supposed to get our blood straight from the source. Why, you may ask?” he stops tactfully, like a professor teaching a class. “Bodies are easier to dispose of. A crime scene isn’t. I don’t appear in pictures, but everyone knows it’s me. So there’s that.”

Hoshiumi props his feet on the table, leaning back on his chair even further. There’s a sinking feeling in his chest, as it dawns on him that he’s truly fucked. “Kita Shinsuke  _ might  _ kill me if he finds me.”

Sachirou is simultaneously impressed with Hoshiumi’s ability to keep his balance, and horrified as he processes the situation they’re in.

“And you’re not going to like this,” Hoshiumi continues, sitting back upright in his chair, which snaps back in place with a  _ thump _ . His facial expression changes to one of disgust, like the last point is what bothers him the most. Like he’s about to cough up something unpleasant. “But word is going around that I’m a  _ humanfucker. _ ”

Sachirou has to hold his breath to stop himself from laughing.  _ Humanfucker _ . Hoshiumi says it like it carries the weight of a human admitting that they’re sexually attracted to livestock. 

“What kind of awful person are you that they’d jump to  _ that  _ conclusion first before thinking we’re in a relationship?” Sachirou just says what’s on his mind, no hesitation.

Hoshiumi doesn’t know how he’s been disarmed so fast in the comfort of his own home. 

“So, did you tell them the truth?” Sachirou presses on, watching Hoshiumi squirm under his calculated gaze, pinning down a still-alive butterfly. “That I’m not human, and that you haven’t even come close to doing such a thing with me? That I’m both… non-consumable  _ and  _ unfuckable to you?”

_No._ _Never. Not in a million years._ When Gao posed the question, Hoshiumi dodged answering him, knowing his denial would sound like agreement. He would rather it be that way then word circulating that Sachirou is both to him. They’d assume that he was _in love_ with the guy, a far worse stain on his reputation than being called a humanfucker.

Hoshiumi dodges again.

“I got you something on my way out,” Hoshiumi jabs a finger at the bags on the table. He starts stripping off his clothes, tired of feeling flighty in his own home. Sachirou isn’t even looking at him anyways. “It won’t give you the same sustenance as blood, but you should still be able to eat it. Make yourself feel at home.”

Folding up his shirt in his arms, a muscle tightening in his neck, Hoshiumi retreats to his room, shutting the door behind him. 

Sachirou opens the plastic bags, eyes widening as he sees little packages of  _ shumai _ that he can see pressed together, under the clear packaging. His favorite food. He doesn’t remember telling Hoshiumi anything about it. 

The first flower blooms in his chest, and it’s not even springtime. 

❈

Hoshiumi doesn’t ask Sachirou to watch movies with him anymore. He doesn’t need to, because it’s become another one of the unspoken habits that they’ve fallen into. Sachirou climbs into his bed, fills the emptiness of his room with quick-witted remarks and quiet laughter a shoulder’s length away.

They’re watching a couple dance across the screen. Amateur dancing to a scratchy record, in space that’s too small to contain two people, let alone two people dancing. Hoshiumi watches, maybe a little too intently, his mind doing the thing where he tries to imagine himself in that situation. 

He loves looking at places he can’t be, experiences he can’t have. Whether it be in paintings, billboards, Hoshiumi is a bit of a voyeur in the sense he loves to look outside-in, letting his imagination recreate the sensation of being there. He imagines exploring the landscapes of paintings, wishing he was made of paint himself. He watches the couple dance, and a part of him thinks it would be nice, though he’d rather die on the spot than admit it out loud.

Hoshiumi is startled when he feels Sachirou tug at his pants. It’s all he’s wearing right now, as Hoshiumi has reverted to his old habit of forgoing shirts (he hates the itch of tags in places he doesn’t expect, and most fabrics feel straight up uncomfortable.)

“You like this don’t you, Kourai-kun?” Sachirou coos. Hoshiumi swats his hand away defensively, unsure if he’s being teased.

“What?” Hoshiumi tries to sound as rude as possible. It’s his saving grace. 

Hoshiumi bristles, Sachirou builds walls. They’re the same without realizing it, raising their defense mechanisms at the slightest provocation.

Sachirou laughs it off, readjusting himself on the bed. “I see it in your expression,” he says, and he smiles in a way that wrinkles the sides of his eyes. He picks up the remote and pauses it, taking Hoshiumi’s hand in his. “C’mon, Kourai-kun. Let’s dance.”

Hoshiumi has always considered himself the perfect killing machine. He’s always fast to take his enemies out before they even have the chance to know they’re being predated upon; he can take lives before enemies even know a chance of death exists. 

“You’re not scared are you? You’ve put your hands all over me at this point, but you’re too shy to dance with me?”

And now, this  _ boy,  _ this barely-vampire mostly human boy, plays him like a marionette doll. Hoshiumi is spinning, mind and body. He has no heart, but if he did, it’d beat to the sound of Sachirou’s voice, guiding him through motions.  _ Baby steps _ , Sachirou says, as he shares anecdotes of his sister, who used to make him dance with her at weddings. He’s used to not stepping on toes, he says, otherwise Shouko would give him hell for it.

Hoshiumi doesn’t know what’s come over him. He’s grateful vampires don’t blush. He just sees Sachirou, beautiful brown eyes and hair that’s long enough to start to curl, and a whirl of color that used to be his room. Dizzy and drunk off whatever this is. He doesn’t want to be Hoshiumi here. 

Sachirou is the first one to let go, light-headed as he admits he’s too dizzy to stand up.

Kourai laughs, and the blossoms in Sachirou’s chest are in full bloom.

❈

The first red petal falls on Sachirou's lap unexpectedly.

And then another one. And then another one. And then before he can stop it, all of the flowers give way to a stream that flows down his face, staining his clothes with blood. He blinks and it's winter everywhere, a landscape where everything familiar is overwhelming white, endless, cold, and horribly dry. The vessels in his nose break without warning, as they always do around this time, and he's bleeding everywhere.

"Fuck." Sachirou stares at his fingertips. He's leaking everywhere, a flower in a place where nothing should grow. 

His mind races with the nightmares he's kept to himself since he's been here. Dreams of sneaking around his mortality, dreams of being ripped apart and consumed, dreams that remind him that as long as he's here, as long as he's with Hoshiumi, he's—

Slammed to the ground with the absence of tenderness, Sachirou doesn't even brace his body for the impact. He falls to the ground like a doll like his soul has been knocked out of his back, freezing him in time. He's been here before. Too many times to count, even before he got tangled in the affairs of vampires. He's a seasoned prey animal, he thinks to himself, so experienced that he doesn't just play dead, he lives like he's dead. 

Perfectly still, his eyes shut so tightly while an animal far more powerful than he is looms over him, breathing cool air over his body. He doesn't tremble anymore. He tenses up, like a child waiting for an injection.

_ You need to obey your instincts. I get it. There's no one that understands you better than I do right now. _

There's a chest pressed against Sachirou's but only one heart between them. Each pulse the prelude to a death rattle.

Sachirou feels something hot course down the side of his face, emerging through the cracks in his eyes he can't close. His years of being immovable are knocked to the ground, and he's lying in a bed of broken glass. He realizes, that tears and blood run different colors but are the same. You don't see them until something is horribly wrong or sustain an injury that breaks you open and hollows you out. He feels hairless, exposed, and vulnerable. He's 12 years old again, scared of the dark, trying to convince himself he's not afraid.

He remembers his dog Kotarou. His best friend in the whole world, that he'd curled in bed with since he was a boy. This is no different from the time that Kotarou, sick and terrified of the vet, lashed out against him when he tried to wrestle him into a kennel. Teeth and claw against flesh. Sachirou bears it all because it's Kotarou. Kotarou, who's blinded by his instincts and forgets who Sachirou is for a moment. This is no different, Sachirou repeats in his head.

He knows that it is different, and his tears are proof. Sachirou didn't cry when Kotarou attacked him. He doesn't cry when he's hurt by others, long accepting that it's part of human nature that no one has the same definition of love, so forcing two incongruous pieces together in a union will always hurt by default. 

"You're hungry aren't you, Hoshiumi?" Sachirou whispers gently, through tears. He cries, knowing full well there's never going to be a time that he feels more human than now, hairless, exposed and vulnerable like he's a newborn crying for his mother. "Go ahead and do it. I won't hate you. You've been hungry for so long."

Hoshiumi, not Kourai.

Not Kourai who stumbles over his own feet when he's trying to learn how to dance. Not Kourai who gets flustered watching romantic dramas, who asks Sachirou too many questions about how being human feels like even though he's experienced so many people and so many lifetimes. Kourai who's bad at hiding his feelings,  _ Kourai-kun _ who doesn't fight his new affectionate name. Kourai who looks more angel than devil when his expression is neutral, peaceful. Kourai, who he wouldn’t mind being killed by.

Hoshiumi chokes the life out of him, pressing knives against his neck, about to fall into him. Sachirou thinks about who he loves.

Kourai, who knows his favorite food and preferred walking routes around Tokyo. Or is that Hoshiumi studying his prey? Maybe it was Hoshiumi all along, a red-eyed devil in the night who wanted a playmate that would belong to him in the end. An agonizingly long end, every passing second feeling like months. 

Ragged breathing becomes a series of gasps. A series of gasps that becomes a string of horrified whispers.

_ No... no, no, no. _

Kourai resurfaces, staring down at the scene under him with the same horror of seeing a live butterfly with its wings pinned to a corkboard. He sees Sachirou under him, teeth clenched and eyes closed and leaking with tears, just like the nightmares he's had the past ten days.

Vampires sleep. Much less than humans do, but it's another secret that Kourai keeps behind locked doors. He's dreamed about Sachirou more times than he wants to admit, dreams that become nightmares if he loses control of himself. 

He wakes up from these nightmares, not remembering when he's left his bed, pressed against the locked door that separates him from Sachirou sleeping in the other room. He's buckled down in pain every time, crawling on all fours to his refrigerator where he drinks blood, over and over again. Draining each vial until he can wash out the smell and taste of Sachirou in his mouth, a fantasy he refuses to indulge.

"What's taking you so long, Hoshiumi? This is everything you've wanted since I've been here," Sachirou continues, not wanting to prolong the inevitable. "There's no future for us. You and I both know we can't run from them and you can't run from who you are forever. Everyone gets tired."

Kourai is fighting every muscle in his body that wants to spring forward. He has an impossibly strong body, and his mind stretches over it, a thin film trying to prevent a breakthrough. “I’m not tired,” Kourai speaks for the first time, his voice husky and pained. He releases his hold on Sachirou, one finger after the other.  _ Baby steps.  _

“Sachirou, I’m not tired yet.”

More tears. Kourai wonders if he’ll ever be able to do anything right with this guy. He’s terrified to see someone so resolute fall apart under him.

“I am,” Sachirou says, and Kourai is startled by how defeated the admission is. He opens his eyes and Kourai can finally see them. Light brown, shimmering with tears, worn out. “I don’t like this anymore.”

When the words escape his mouth, something between him and Kourai changes like a string snapping after it’s pulled taut. Sachirou feels freedom again, that tastes like the blood that leaks into his mouth, like Tokyo at night.

“Kourai-kun, I know you’re stronger than me. You shine brighter than I ever will. You’re more alive than I ever will be, and so is the rest of your kind. When I’m with you… I forget that I don’t believe in love sometimes,” with his blood and tears already pooling out, Sachirou doesn’t see any need to stop his feelings from flowing.

Kourai stops and listens. Clings to every word.

“But you make me feel like a person, with all of the weaknesses of being human. That no matter how similar we might be, or how we try to fool ourselves it’s not the case, I’m designed to be eaten whole by you. If it has to be anyone, I hope it’s you,” Sachirou’s cries come out like a plea.

With that, Sachirou knows he’s given all of himself away. No greater love than offering yourself up for consumption. No greater commitment than asking Kourai to sign his life away with his teeth. 

“Do it,” Sachirou pulls down his own shirt, exposing the marks that Kourai has left all over his body from practicing restraint. His body is a canvas, an unfinished painting missing one more stroke of paint, the jugular of his neck. A pulse that’s begging to be snuffed out already. “Bite me, Kourai.  _ For real _ this time.”

Kourai gazes back at Sachirou. He never wants to forget this face. Warm brown all over, pooled in his large eyes and spilling out in soft waves of hair. Warm when he smiles, warmer when he laughs, warmest when he cries and bleeds. 

Even when he’s cold, Kourai can feel the warmth he holds back. 

“Thank you for loving me,” Kourai says. He’s crying now. “Thank you Sachirou. I’m so sorry.”

Kourai lowers his face. He can already feel the sunshine at the end of a long winter. He closes his eyes, closing one hand around Sachirou’s so that their hands are intertwined. Another hand that runs down the curls of his hair, down his face where it stays forever, so that he never forgets how Sachirou feels. Kourai’s lips part, and Sachirou’s neck tenses up under his touch—

Except Kourai’s teeth never reach his neck. At the razor blade’s edge of consummation and consumption, he inflicts something far more painful than a bite.

A kiss.

❈

_**iii. selfish with love (reprise)** _

It’s not a first kiss for any of them, but Sachirou would be hard-pressed to find a more intense experience than making out with a vampire in the middle of a nosebleed and coming out alive. He presses his index finger to his bottom lip, remembering the sensation of Kourai’s lips against his. The taste of exchanging blood between clashing tongues. 

“How do you feel?” Kourai asks, passing him a tissue. He has a careless arm around Sachirou’s bare shoulder, and a satisfied expression on his face. He’s had his fill, still savoring the taste and memory of Sachirou’s blood straight from his mouth. Warmth that stains his insides golden. 

“Like I’ve lost my virginity,” Sachirou replies with amusement— all the more blunt than ever. Maybe even worse now. Kourai smirks, before letting a laugh escape from his mouth. Echoes through the room, filling it with stars. 

❈

“When is your birthday?”

Kourai is always buzzing with questions. He’s always probing and prodding at Sachirou like he’s trying to get at his essence.

“February 3rd,” Sachirou answers, making a rocking motion with his arms absently. “Apparently I didn’t cry when I was born.”

Monster in the making. Kourai spots another time where Sachirou is more inhuman than he is, remembering how his own mother used to chastise him for crying so much as a child.

“What year?”

“1996.”

Kourai surges upward like a hot-air balloon rising too fast that explodes mid-air, letting out a triumphant laugh. He doesn’t win in height, but he marks his victories everywhere else where he can. “I’m older than you then by ten months and eleven days exactly,” he says, even though that should be a given. “Mine is April 16, 1995.”

“Is that so? What a bummer,” Sachirou says both wistfully and sarcastically, a shrewd smile creeping on his face.  _ Young enough to have been human.  _ “Here I was hoping you were at least a century. I have a thing for older guys you know.”

Kourai aims a swift kick at him, and Sachirou dodges with the reflexes granted to him as a pseudo-vampire. It’s his turn to laugh. Ah, love. 

❈

“Let’s share this one.”

Kourai flicks off the stopper of the vial with his teeth, a slight growl escaping his lips as he fumbles with the seal.  _ Damn humans and their proofing _ , he thinks before it comes out with a pop, a sound that reminds Sachirou of a bottle of champagne.

“Classy,” Sachirou says with pursed lips, eliciting a noise of annoyance from Kourai. He’s sitting on the bed, cross-legged and eying the stack of magazines by Kourai’s bedside table, plastered with male models in provocative positions. 

“Open up,” Kourai walks over, tilting Sachirou’s chin, wiggling a finger between his lips and parting his mouth. There’s some resistance with Sachirou’s half-formed fangs under his index finger, a sign that he’s enjoying being difficult far too much. Kourai fights a stupid grin that’s pushing at his cheeks. “Stop that.. It tickles.”

Too busy with quenching his own insatiable thirst, Kourai underestimated how much Sachirou needed.  _ Newborn vampires are the worst at portion control _ , Kourai remembers Hinata instructing him years ago. Information he never thought he’d need, since he had no intention on increasing the vampire population.  _ They’re basically worse than we are, so if you ever bring one into this world, watch them carefully. _

“If I let you have everything you want, you’ll rob me of my entire supply again. Consider this portion control,” Kourai murmurs under his breath, counting the drops of blood. Usually it’s twelve. Today he feels like spoiling him a bit. “13. Sorry.” He lets Sachirou go.

“Kourai-kun, I’m so hungry,” Sachirou whines, collapsing onto the bed as Kourai downs the rest of the vial, gulping the rest of the blood down before joining him on the bed.

“I gave you more than usual. Consider that an early Christmas present, even though I don’t celebrate Christmas,” Kourai says gruffly, wiping his mouth. A smear of blood on his bare arm. Sachirou fights the urge to lick it off.

“Me neither. I don’t really have a family anymore. The holidays sure are lonely,” Sachirou spots a marked-off calendar on Kourai’s wall.  _ Another shirtless guy.  _ “And coming soon.”

“That’s too bad,” Kourai murmurs, trying to remember if his mother celebrated the holidays when they were kids. They never kept track of the months and days back then, but there were times Asa would come home with presents. He hesitates. “I like the decorations they put up.”

“Oh, the lights?” Sachirou thinks of the bright trails of light that decorate the trees in midtown Tokyo, cycling through an array of colors. He smiles, remembering better times with his siblings, when his brother used to lift him into the air right in front of the Christmas trees. “Yeah, I like them too.”

“Oh,” Kourai is surprised to hear this, expecting Sachirou’s usual dismissiveness toward the “effusive” displays of emotion and appearance in the things that he likes. “So there are things that you like.”

“I like a lot of things,” Sachirou cuts in defensively. “Animals, nature, food… Kourai-kun sometimes.”  _ Things that are honest with their intentions. _

“I’ve always wanted to take someone into the city when those lights are up and kiss them everywhere. Listen to the stupid music they play, walk around abandoned spots like the world is ours, and maybe climb to the top of one of those fancy trees,” Kourai makes a grand declaration, much to Sachirou’s bewilderment. “What?”

Sachirou flushes, not sure why Kourai’s words are making him feel this way. “Well aren’t you romantic,” his ears feel hot.

“Your old boyfriends ever do that with you?” Kourai asks, leaning in. Drinking blood has made him more confident to exist around Sachirou comfortably. Bolder. “I mean, I’m planning on going out to the city again soon for more blood.” He’s fully aware of how dangerous that is, but there’s a spark in his mind that’s been set alight. “Or is this going to be your first time?”

“I don’t know if I’m the right person to give you what you want,” Sachirou says, palming his hair with one hand.  _ This is beyond the realm of the fact that you’re a vampire and I’m not.  _ He doesn’t know why he feels uneasy. He’s never been out in public before with a lover, and the idea makes him feel more exposed than actually being naked.

“You are,” Kourai lines up everything Sachirou’s stacked against himself and knocks it down easily. They’re lying down next to each other, shoulders touching. Kourai turns to face him, planting his elbow into the mattress and framing his own face attractively. “You don’t make sense to me at all, but I think that’s what makes you interesting. It feels like I can’t take my eyes off you.You feel the same way too, I think.”

Sachirou lets himself look, regretting it immediately as a blush creeps across his face. When you’re lying down sideways on a bed, height doesn’t exist anymore. He’s lost his advantage, staring straight into Hoshiumi Kourai’s intense red eyes that see straight through him. 

“I do,” he admits like a vow. He reaches for Kourai’s hand by his side. “I like you, Kourai-kun.”

“I know that,” Kourai lets out a chuckle. _There’s that blush I like_ , he brushes a hand across Sachirou’s face, pushing aside his bangs. Running his hand down his face, past his shoulders, stopping at his waist. “It’s written all over your eyes. But I want to hear something before we keep going.”

Everything about Sachirou tightens up under Kourai’s touch, like he’s starved for it, but too scared at indulging it. They’re more alike than they realize. For Kourai, it’s blood. For Sachirou, it’s skin.

“You love me, right?”

The word love is a heavy one for both of them, in ways they have yet to discover about one another. Kourai feels like he’s giving up half of his soul to ask something so blatantly. 

Sachirou gives him an answer that costs half of his own soul. One that makes Kourai kiss him so hard that it feels like both of them are going to break.

❈

There’s three vials of blood left. Kourai thinks that it’ll probably last them twenty more days or so, maybe more depending on their mutual resolve. He knows he’ll have to go out again. Stick his head as quietly through the guillotine and hope the people that want him dead aren’t around to pull the rope.

He’s trying to pretend that everything is normal between them, that they’re part of the same world. That he doesn’t need blood like he needs air to breathe and that he has to hold his breath every time he plunges into the ocean that is his love. That he doesn’t have to consume twice the amount of blood he normally does to be safely intimate with his food.

The love between a lamb and a wolf is one that can’t be requited, let alone consummated. It’s one of the ancient, unsaid laws of the universe and when you replace lamb with “human” and wolf with “vampire”, it’s more understandable why  _ humanfucker _ carries the weight of a thousand discarded lead crosses.

A weight that Kourai casts aside like his own identity, throwing the clothes off his body. He sinks into a human, without his teeth going anywhere near another person’s neck. Plunging deeper into endless folds of softness and warmth that give him the illusion that  _ he’s  _ the one being consumed, love tightening around him like an embrace soaked in honey. He can’t help but release involuntary groans of pleasure. 

He sings curses under his throat, his ears taking in Sachirou’s heartbeat and his power to make it faster or slow it down. He reaches over for a kiss, hearing the blood rush to parts Sachirou’s body as they wrap their mouths together, eyes closed. 

“Does it hurt?” Kourai whispers gently, stopping by Sachirou’s ear. Hands in his hair. 

“Not at all, Kourai-kun. Not with you,” he breathes, his hands full of sheets and his voice full of love and gratitude. “You’re so gentle.”

“I said I’d take care of you, right?” Kourai caresses his face lovingly, a touch that’s new to both of them. He leans into the nape of Sachirou’s neck, breathing heavily like he’s intoxicated, slowly dragging his teeth along his skin.

Their togetherness makes Kourai feel what he’s been searching for long before he’s met Sachirou. He finally has it in his hands, pulsing through his body like the heartbeat he’s never had. He feels human. 

But it’s his hubris.

Something violent and carnal snaps inside of Kourai, a dissonant chord that ends the waves of ecstasy that wasn’t his to have. As if the tether he’s attached to himself before diving headfirst into Hell has snapped, sending him plummeting into the inferno.

He’s a beast in a frenzy, lashing out with his fangs outstretched, his eyes seeing the word as a wet painting with the colors bleeding together. He doesn’t see his room anymore, he doesn’t remember who Sachirou is, and he’s tearing apart everything that stands in his way when a white hot pain flashes through his eyes that wakes him up from this nightmare.

Forcing him to face the turbulent wake he’s left in the aftermath of chasing love. Torn fabric everywhere, feathers littering the room as if he’s torn the wings off an angel with his bare hands, and violent bitemarks in  _ his own  _ arm that spell out his murderous intentions.

“Sachirou.”

Kourai gasps, his luminous eyes filled with regret and worry. He sees Sachirou at the edge of his bed, brown eyes wide but not terrified. Love makes him hate himself. 

“You need to be more scared of me,” Kourai chokes out, angry that he can’t find a trace of horror in Sachirou’s eyes right now. The word vampire floods his brain like the first time Asa told him what he was.  _ A vampire, not human. Two different worlds you’ve been born in the middle of. _ “Be scared of me... like humans normally are.”

Sachirou’s heart is pounding against his chest. His blood ran cold at the sight of Kourai unleashing his ferocity like a rabid animal, a reminder of how freakishly strong and unequal they were, but he also doesn’t see a vampire. He sees Kourai, who’s hurting in ways that he doesn’t know.

“You threw me aside before you could hurt me,” Sachirou says reassuringly. He wants to reach out to Kourai so badly, to bridge the distance between them by taking him into his arms. He’s never seen Kourai so clearly before, so terrifyingly strong and yet vulnerable.

And because he’s weak, Kourai doesn’t move when Sachirou holds him in a way that feels so undeserving given his sins. Loves him in the self-sacrificing way humans love what can destroy them. 

“Are you a masochist?” Kourai asks, thinking of how Sachirou shows his love in the face of mortality and never anything in between. He doesn’t deserve this tenderness.

Sachirou smiles at this insight like he’s musing over a joke. “Maybe,” he says, his hands on Kourai’s shoulder with the same confidence as leading him in a dance. “Let me sleep with you tonight, okay? Don’t exile me to the couch tonight.”

Kourai is shocked by the suggestion, convinced that he’s talking to someone who’s lost their mind. “What if I wake up and you’re dead? What if I kill you in my sleep when I can’t control myself? It’s been two times and you’re still not scared enough!” Kourai’s voice is strained, but he doesn’t fight Sachirou’s hand closing over his own. 

Sachirou brings his face level to Kourai’s his dark brown eyes serious in the dim light. “Then know this. I’ve already accepted that if anyone is going to kill me, if I’m going to die in every permutation of how this plays out, I don’t mind if it’s you. Only Kourai-kun can have me.”

They ease into each other, close to each other as bodies can get. Kourai feels Sachirou’s heartbeat against his arm, a steady rhythm he’ll never forget. A heartbeat that reassures Kourai that Sachirou is alive, can fight him back easily, and is right there in front of him. “Okay,” Kourai closes his eyes. He burrows his face into Sachirou’s hair, feeling his breath against his bare chest. His bare torso pressed against his. “I’m sorry I don’t have a heartbeat to offer you. All I have is my promise. I won’t let anyone have you. Not even me.”

Kourai pauses, pulling back. 

He remembers one more thing about the nature of vampires he hasn’t disclosed to Sachirou yet. Something else that he can give, that he’s never let anyone do to him before. He tilts his head to the side, exposing his neck. The most intimate gesture from one vampire to another.

“When a vampire bites one of its own kind, they get the other persons’ memories. It’s how I’ve gotten so strong so fast. I’ve bitten all my partners,” Kourai mutters, knowing he’s offering himself all at once. “All more powerful than me. All begging me to in the heat of the moment.”

_ But this is different. _ He pulls Sachirou closer to him, and this time he’s the one begging.

He loves Sachirou more than anything in the whole world.

Sachirou loves him, too. 

Kourai cries as Sachirou bites down, hard. 

❈

Kourai’s eyes flutter open, feeling a weight pressing down on his chest that breathes under the sheets like a heartbeat. A sight painted in the golden sunbeams that wash over them, a kiss from the sky that graces him with a glimpse of beauty. His fingers curl up against the linen sheets, he wants to hold onto the fabric of time as tightly as he can, just for this second, where Sachirou lies against his chest and he feels human in every sense of the world.

❈

Tokyo Midtown has been transformed into a picturesque landscape of a winter wonderland, brimming with breathtaking displays of light that compliment the urban beauty of the city. 

Kourai takes in this scene with bated breath, suppressing the wonder he wants to release at the sight of the illumination that surrounds them. Red and green orbs carpeting the fire hydrants and mailboxes that line the street, icy white lights stringing the trees, shifting through arrays of color like verses of a song; he’s always thought of the city as mundane, but tonight the city has become a prepossessing sight.

“The city at night is more beautiful when you’re not alone.”

Sachirou stops for a moment, taking Kourai’s hand in his, pushing his numb fingers through the space Kourai lets him have. He’s not supposed to be here, but he knows Kourai doesn’t want to go alone. Even if this mission is far more dangerous than the ones he’s been on before. Kourai doesn’t have warmth to offer him back, but Sachirou doesn’t mind.

Kourai doesn’t have a plan in his head on how he’s going to get blood or where. He says he’ll hunt whoever is foolish enough to enter his feeding grounds so late at night— a time where dawn and day cross paths.

“If I hunt tonight, will you look away?” Kourai asks, hating to mar the atmosphere of the night with his true objective. 

“I’ve already seen it before,” Sachirou smiles charmingly, pressing an index finger to his head. “Remember? I’ve seen you hunt hundreds of times.”

“Right,” Kourai knows it’ll take time getting used to the fact that Sachirou knows all of him. It drives him crazy that Sachirou is still an impenetrable barrier to him, tainted by Atsumu’s blood.

They walk through the plaza, Kourai prompting Sachirou for more childhood memories of their surroundings, facts about their location. He’s in his own feeding grounds that he used to call a second home, but he’s never known his own territory from the perspective of a human. When he’s with Sachirou, it’s not like when he’s with others.

Kourai always talks. He doesn’t care to listen to the input of other vampires, who he’ll extract secrets from anyways when they beg him to bite him. 

When he’s with Sachirou, Kourai listens, like he’s perching outside a window looking into a world he wants to be part of. 

If someone else happened to pass them by change, they’d see a regular couple walking down the streets of Tokyo midtown, bickering with white breath in the cold of the winter. They walk into midtown’s famous Starlight Garden, a park square spanning an area of 2,000m² covered full of tiny light-emitting devices and balloons streaming nothing but white and blue light. Sachirou is the one that guides him there, straying out of his familiar grounds into this new place he “absolutely needs to see” before the night ends.

Breathtaking. In more ways than one, when Kourai in the midst of his staring, gets kissed off-guard. He’s not used to the feeling of flying when he’s not the one in control.

“I’m sorry that I’m not the kind of person you can kiss everywhere around the city, but I hope this one kiss can be something Kourai-kun remembers for a long time,” Sachirou says shyly. 

Kourai touches his lips with a smirk. “What are you? Some romantic lead of a drama? I’ll kiss you wherever I want. I just didn’t want to bother you, that’s all.”

They break away from staring into each others’ eyes to look at the night sky at their feet. Like someone ripped out the celestial bodies from the night sky and replanted it into the earth. Dragging the ocean of stars from heaven so that humans can walk amongst them.

Sachirou stops before Kourai. He playfully moves his fingers into the shape of a camera frame, clicking an imaginary shutter with no flash. Kourai blinks in confusion as Sachirou grins playfully, eyes alight like two firestones. “I call this one an ocean of stars among an ocean of stars,” he says.

“I don’t appear in pictures, you know…”

“I know. This one is just for my memories.”

Sachirou’s face burns hot when he realizes he’s gushing like the couples he usually diverts his gaze from in public. Kourai laughs, tugging on his scarf to pull him in for a kiss. He wishes he could blush too.

They leave the stars to go back into the city. Kourai smells a human, at least fives miles away, suddenly appearing on his radar like a reminder that he has more things he has to do tonight in the city than fall in love. He chases the smell, following a ribbon that’s snaking its way in between buildings. Sachirou follows.

Kourai doesn’t know it’s a trap. 

Kourai doesn’t know that days earlier, Kita Shinsuke went to the blood bank to investigate  _ how  _ much blood had been taken and how long he expected Kourai to snap.

Kourai doesn’t know that at the end of the rainbow, is a suspension of mangled corpses where the Miya twins and company await him, ready to exact their revenge, dressed in execution robes. He walks unknowingly, into the beginning of a ceremony that’s supposed to be for the death of an immortal, with an entire cavalry of vampires looking to bring down Hoshiumi Kourai once and for all. The second guest isn’t expected, but is more than welcome.

Kourai doesn’t know that fox-eyed vampires have stationed themselves around his usual feeding grounds like patient statues of angels in the night for every day the past month. And that he’s been triggering the trap by stumbling into invisible ropes they’ve strewn around the area.

There’s so much Kourai doesn’t know that hits him like a wave of panic once he hears the cage shut behind him. When he sees pairs of blood-red eyes emerging from places he thought were occupied, and vampires that shouldn’t be there— he sees Suna Rintarou emerge from the shadows behind the twins, followed with faces he hasn’t seen since the time his mother was taken away— Kourai knows one truth that he’ll carry to his grave.

Kourai knows he’s been selfish with love. Like his mother before him, who he believed was the loneliest person in the whole world. He knows he’s been nothing but selfish, like when he bit his mother, when he followed Sachirou through the city, when he took their fates and intertwined them knowing that they were never destined for a happy ending, and now when he’s taken Sachirou into his own ruins.

Kourai looks at Sachirou. He knows it’s the end. Surrounded by a ring of fire, of monsters that he can and will fight tooth and nail before he loses to them, he mouths what could be his last words.

_ I’m sorry. _


	3. Part III: Second Nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a boy named happiness has a talk with not-god, the angel who loves him bows his head to his greatest adversary

_**i. SURRENDER TO LOVE** _

Unconditional surrender.

Hoshiumi Kourai’s body is torn apart by a sea of hands, licking away at his body like flames in Hell. Beating him with ceaseless violence to the point he’s sure his form has been stripped away, no longer possessing a shape or any weapons that he can fight back with. Hoshiumi, who once was unstoppable by definition, completely rewritten to the point that all he can do is surrender while the world closes in on him. Fair and unfair.

Fair because everything he’d done up to this point fought against the code of his existence; putting the entire vampire world at risk in his pursuit of love. Unfair because Sachirou should have never been a part of this, a victim of circumstance that should have died as nature willed it months ago.

Hoshiumi doesn’t have any blood to give. He only has his body, which he’s offered up to those more powerful time and time again. This is no exception. 

As the light fades from his eyes, Hoshiumi fears death for the first time. He finally understands how it feels to be Sachirou, the closest they’ll ever be in mind and the farthest they’ll be in body. He hopes he’ll see Sachirou again in whatever happens afterward, if afterlives exist.

_ Maybe we’ll end up in another hell together when I wake up again. _

The last thing he sees is Kita Shinsuke standing over him. Hand outstretched. Divine justice, taking back what is his. 

The hand of God.

❂

Hoshiumi expects an endless dark staircase to unfurl before him when he thinks about how he’ll be welcomed to Hell. What he doesn’t expect is the feeling of wind brushing against him like he has wings, like he’s flying higher through the clouds, mist filling up his eyes and lungs…

He chokes and coughs, awakening in the arms of an angel. The mist is suffocating, like he’s been plunged in water again and again and he starts cursing under his breath, wanting to beat the angel in the chest for dragging him through such an ordeal on his way to his next life.

But he has no hands. No arms. He’s limbless and wingless, a miserable torso.

Hoshiumi is alive.

“Hoshiumi-san?”

The angel stops in the air, suspended in time for a bit. It’s a face that Hoshiumi hasn’t seen for a few months, that he doesn’t  _ want  _ to ever see him in such a defeated state, especially now.

Hinata Shouyou at his best, looking like an ethereal being in the moonlight and a pure-white tunic, is staring down at him with a mixture of delight and relief. He grabs Hoshiumi by the scruff far too roughly, celebrating his reawakening. “Hoshiumi-san, thank goodness you’re awake!” Hinata says, turning his head to address unseen companions. “We were worried that we got there too late.”

Hoshiumi wants to scream, but his mouth is in no state to move. He wishes he were dead instead of at the mercy of Hinata Shouyou, his greatest rival, the first vampire that plucked him out of the earth and showed him how to walk amongst them. Someone that he refuses to show any side of but his best to. An old flame, burning so strongly in the nighttime. Hinata leans into him, a mischievous grin spreading on his boyish face.

Hinata smells food all over Hoshiumi, as if he’s bathed directly in a human’s blood. He licks his lips.

“So the rumors are true, Hoshiumi-san,” Hinata says smugly. He enjoys the sight of someone as proud as Hoshiumi Kourai, broken down into components and begging for mercy. “If I didn’t see your face, I would’ve mistaken you for a human and bitten you.”

Hinata’s eyes notice a pair of bitemarks by Hoshiumi’s neck, his eyebrows rising. Hoshiumi is glad he doesn’t have blood, the pressure in his chest enough to make his body cave in from the outside. He’s laughing. 

“Oh man, I didn’t know it was this bad… Hoshiumi-san, you’ve gone and submitted to a human.”

_ No! _ Hoshiumi wants to yell, curses flowing under his breath at the speed of light.  _ You don’t understand! I made him submit to me, Hinata Shouyou! Just like you will once I... _

Another audience member to Hoshiumi’s endless suffering appears. “Easy now, Shouyou. Now’s not the time to rile him up,” the voice is deep and sonorous, but warm. Ojiro Aran catches up, a magnificent bronze statue of an angel. “We should be grateful that we’ve all gotten out alive. Inarizaki came for an execution and we disrupted it.”

“It’s not like they could win,” Hinata says gleefully, a maniacal grin spreading across his face. “Atsumu-san has been chasing me for years to no avail, and you’re on good rapport with Kita-san. Speaking of which, how is courting going?”

“How do you know about that?”

“I know about every vampire in Japan. After all, I have my sources,” Hinata replies, proudly. He’s not afraid of showing his pride anymore, Hoshiumi notes, thinking of their first meeting years ago. 

Hinata Shouyou was a legend among their kind, a runt who started from the bottom rung of the vampire hierarchy in Japan and moved his way to the top, becoming the most connected of them all with information boundless. 

Hinata stops on top of a building for a moment. “Say, Ojiro-san,” he asks, his ears perking up. “Did you see what happened to Hoshiumi-san’s human? I lost track when I was fighting off the twins. He was with Kita-san, right?”

The sudden silence that falls between the three vampires is unbearable to Hoshiumi, whose heart moves to his stomach as he remembers Sachirou. As he remembers the hand of Kita Shinsuke before him, like a solitary god who’s taken away the second person he’s ever let his heart love. 

_ No… _ Hoshiumi wants to lose the ability to hear, unable to face Sachirou’s death even now. 

“I didn’t see anyone feeding on him,” Aran says, and a part of Hoshiumi that was wound up so tightly seconds ago unravels. “But that human was weird.”

“He smelled so good,” Hinata says almost dreamily. “When I caught that scent for the first time, I had the urge to hunt even though we just fed. Isn’t that crazy? But now, I’m not so sure that was a human. You see, he’s bitten Hoshiumi-san.”

_ Bitten Hoshiumi? _ Aran takes a second to register the words. Hoshiumi Kourai, too proud to let anyone subdue him, allowed a lesser lifeform to  _ bite him. _ The significance of the gesture moves Aran. Hoshiumi Kourai, proud of his secrets while claiming he had nothing to offer but everything to take, let someone take from him in the most intimate way that vampires know.

“He’s not human or vampire,” Aran concludes, remembering seeing Kita make off with Sachirou’s body into the night as the chaos unfolded. “If I have to read Kita’s mind… an existence like that would be very interesting to him.”

“Did you hear that, Hoshiumi-san?” Hinata is far too comfortable handling Hoshiumi, far too tactile as always as he cups the incapacitated vampire’s face in his hands. “He might still be alive!”

Hoshiumi stares past Hinata, his eyes glazed over. He’s never been in so much physical pain in his entire existence, never beaten so badly, and yet the feeling in his heart eclipses that pain. 

_ Sachirou is still alive,  _ Hoshiumi’s mind churns with worry, and suddenly, he’s frustrated with his state of being. Frustrated that he can’t be more alive than he is right now, wanting to run back into the night and take back what’s his. 

“As long as he stays interesting,” Aran mutters, a darker scenario crossing his mind. “You’ve smelled him for yourself. To vampires, we don’t see him as one of us. He’s far too palatable. Dangerous to humans and vampires alike, if he feeds on blood. If he can’t convince Kita that he’s worth keeping alive, he’s food for the twins. But that’s completely out of our hands.”

Hinata frowns. He’s unhappy with how this story ends, easily becoming invested enough from the signs he reads off Hoshiumi, who he knows well enough to understand without words. “I hope he’s as interesting to them as he was to Hoshiumi-san,” he says, glancing out into the city. 

“Speaking of which, where should we take Hoshiumi?” Aran asks, looking around. “He’s never told anyone where he lives. Do you know?”

“Nope!” Hinata slings Hoshiumi back over his shoulder, not noticing the white-haired vampire wince in pain. “Let’s take him back to my place with the others. Hoshiumi-san, you’re so light now… let’s get you something to eat.”

And so, the great Hoshiumi Kourai finds himself at the mercy of his too-friendly enemies in an unexpected turn of events. At the mercy of love.

❂

Another cage.

Sachirou wants to laugh at his cruel fate, trapped in an endless chain of graduating from one cage into another, each one smaller in size with walls that become more corporeal and rigid. 

Sachirou’s stone cage is furnished only with a ticking clock, placed high enough that even with his impressive height, he couldn’t hope to reach it. He knows that it exists solely as a form of psychological torture as it reminds him that the precession of time doesn’t stop, even if you’re imprisoned. The ticks are the only noise he’s heard apart from his own voice, a metronome that drives him insane when he tries to sleep on the cold stone ground. 

Sachirou doesn’t know how he looks like anymore. He hasn’t seen a mirror in so long, since the time he arrived at Inarizaki’s fortress and he was left alone to be “processed” by one of the fox-eyed vampires before being confined. He remembers being pulled by his hair, forced to look at himself in front of a mirror while he heard the whir of an electric shear.

His soft brown locks fell to the ground like autumn leaves, collecting at his feet. No tears, no resistance, even when the shear brushes far too close to his scalp. A leering voice tells him that he’s “too pretty of a thing to be judged fairly by the eyes of God” telling him that if he’s lucky, he could become a “little decoration for our leader.”

Sachirou used to accept that role for what it was, but now the mere concept fills him with an aversion to reject that reality with every inch of his flesh. He’d spent his entire life as a projection of someone’s ideals, beaten into submission until he assumed the shape of a vessel that others could admire from outside. His time with Kourai teaches him that he wants to be shapeless and free. Air, not stone.

He stares down at his hands, wretched and calloused from trying to claw his way out of stone. Sachirou’s resolve is clear. He’d rather destroy himself than become someone else’s property.

❂

Kourai presses the outline of his hand against a glass window, gazing out at the sprawling gardens outside. He’s never radiated with warmth in his life, so there’s no fog when his fingertips freeze in response, sending a spark through his nerves that tells him that he’s been put together again. 

He’s farther from home than he’s been for a while, staying at Hinata Shouyou’s place until his wounds close up. Hinata mentions that it’s not exactly  _ his  _ place, but he’s lived here with Kenma for the past twenty or so years, a spectacular mansion converted from an old hotel that houses about ten other powerful vampires in the affluent neighborhood of Roppongi Hills.

Miles away, Sachirou falls apart while Kourai is stitched back together. Kourai runs a thumb over the seams, unsure of how long it will take before the stitches get reabsorbed into his skin. 

“Hinata Shouyou was right. You are good with your hands,” Kourai doesn’t give compliments easily, but he’s impressed by unique talents. Emerging from the shadows with eclipse-black hair and dressed elegantly in a cloak, Kageyama Tobio nods in response.

“I’ve had time to perfect my craft. How does the rest of your body feel, Hoshiumi-san?” Kageyama asks, his tone professional. He’s someone Hoshiumi has heard volumes about, but has never met until now.

Hoshiumi hears footsteps against the marble floors. A pitter-patter of steps, like a bird skid-landing on a pond. He knows who it is before it speaks.

“He’s amazing, isn’t he?” Hinata Shouyou emerges from his vantage point on the top of rails, unable to stay left out of the interaction. He soars back and forth between worlds and conversations like there’s nothing to stop him. “My partner, Kageyama.”

_ Partners. _ Hoshiumi furrows his brow. He knows what it means, even if the word sounds foreign to him.

“So you found him after all,” Hoshiumi says. He grins, remembering Hinata Shouyou’s conquest to chase down the vampire that created him across the world. Kageyama Tobio, who stands before him a boy with delicate fingers and porcelain face, but the unconquerable mountain in other legends.

But at least, next to a burning sun like Hinata Shouyou who bleeds golden light, Kageyama is a mountain rendered into a boy. Hoshiumi doesn’t feel intimidated in the least.

“Found him, beat him, and dragged him back to Japan with me!” Hinata slings his arm around Kageyama, who flinches in response. Too strong for his own good, as always. An earthquake of a presence. “Oh, Hoshiumi-san, you must be starving. I’ve got all sorts of blood on tap by type and date of collection, so please help yourself.”

“What is this, a bar?” Hoshiumi stifles laughter at the adoption of human phrases that he’s only heard in movies and television. His eyes narrow. “I’ll take your offer now, but once I’m fed, I’m going back outside again. I need to find him.”

His statement is met with pointed surprise, Hinata stares at him like he’s absolutely crazy. Usually, it’s the other way around, with people gawking at Hinata’s latent insanity.

“Hoshiumi-san,” Hinata palms a hand through his blazing orange hair. 

Hoshiumi Kourai had always been out-of-this-world even by the standards of vampirism, but never unpredictable. He was a rarity among their kind who operated alone and with sharp decision-making, opting to never put himself in harm’s way whenever he could with reason. Hinata doesn’t know the striking vampire in front of him anymore.

“What did that human do to you?”

❂

Sachirou lays on the ground listless, seeing shapes where they don’t exist in the cracks of the stone ceiling. His mind has been so understimulated, he’s started hallucinating, construction voices from vibrations in the air. Images reconstructed from fragments that he stores and replays in the back of his mind. 

He can’t die either. All damage regenerates after a nights’ sleep. To vampires, he’s human. To humans, he’s a vampire. No place of belonging, nowhere to call home. Was Kourai’s place even a home? He’s not so sure. He’s starting to doubt his rose-tinted memories of their time together. He wonders if what makes him beautiful to Hoshiumi is his humanity. His weakness.

Kourai hates other vampires, including himself. Sachirou is how he gets as far away from that as possible. He sees him as the paragon of what a human male  _ should  _ be. Sachirou remembers the boys on posters around Kourai’s rooms, gay men’s magazines of  _ Seishin  _ and  _ Bʌ́di _ lying around the room. He isn’t vain but he recognizes his own features on the coverboys on the dog-eared magazines. In every phase of his life, Sachirou looks the part and plays it, and for a while, he  _ thinks  _ he’s happy. Once the fog of happiness wears off and doubt takes over like a creeping vine, he finds himself in the same position he’s in now. 

Happiness. Sachirou mulls over that word, tracing the character of his given name into the palm of his hand. Over and over again, like a mantra.  _ Happiness.  _ The last time he’d seriously thought about that word was the day before everything went to shit, standing outside of Ninth Circle and remembering his grandmother. Drunk off cheap alcohol and dancing with strangers, he thought of his  _ obaachan _ and how she’d be unhappy about the series of decisions that led up to his life. 

The clock ticks, a loud gunshot in the silence.

Sachirou stares at the palm of his hand and the invisible kanji he’d traced into it hundreds of times with the nail of his index finger. 幸.  _ “Yuki.” _ Happiness. He never felt as if he lived his life to its definition. He realizes it now. He’s tied his definition of the word happiness to the happiness of others and his capacity to satisfy it. His parents’ happiness, his grandmother’s happiness, his partners’, maybe even Kourai’s happiness. 

_ What makes me happy? _

Bliss was always a momentary feeling for him. He remembers feeling it when his parents expressed gratitude when he spent all summer working the family business as a teenager. His grandmother grinning in her hospital bed when he lied about thinking the family friend’s daughter was “cute”, feeding into her fantasy of great-grandchildren, even though he’d kissed a boy earlier that day. 

Kourai’s face lighting up in an ocean of stars, his luminous crimson eyes thanking him for kissing him in a city full of Christmas lights. For giving him a taste of humanity he’d never had.

He likes to please people.

_ Wait, _ Sachirou thinks. That instance was a different type of bliss compared to the times with his family. That was something more permanent, a memory that softens something hard in his heart. Kourai smiling made him happy, too.  _ Maybe that’s real. Even if normally, I’d never do that with a boyfriend. Is he my boyfriend?  _

Did happiness always come with compromise? Sachirou rearranges the characters in his head. The concept of happiness and the concept of compromise existed on two different axes, and yet were intertwined in all of his experiences. He searches for experiences in his memories for happiness-without-compromise.

The day he adopted Kotarou. Sachirou’s parents took him to the local shelter in Nagano while Fukuro and Shouko stayed at home. As the baby of the family, he rarely spent any individual time with his parents nor did he ever get the chance to  _ choose _ anything in his life. But several years ago around Christmas, his parents let him choose the dog.

Kotarou was the most difficult puppy at the shelter. Scared of humans, full of boundless energy that could barely be contained in a furry package, and had wet himself immediately upon meeting strangers. Sachirou looked at Kotarou, brown eyes to brown eyes, and he saw a mirror image of his soul. His parents protested, but Sachirou held them to their promise.  _ “I get to choose the dog. You said so!”  _

It was the least his parents could offer him, he’d endured so much. He doesn’t remember where that defiance went, beaten down over time. He loved every inch of Kotarou, his only friend.

The day Kotarou comes home is the last happy memory he has of his family. The rift between members of the Hirugami family had only gotten deeper and irreconcilable following his grandmother’s demise. After one violent argument too many, Sachirou packed up all of his belongings in fear, hoping he’s not discovered when he crammed his belongings into the trunk of his old car. Sachirou’s knuckles stung from taking hits from one of his parents’ many disciplinary items. He knows from testing the waters that he’ll never be accepted by his own kind. 

“Be good Kotarou,” Sachirou wiped away angry tears that stung against his open wounds. He’s lucky to get out safely. He’s never prayed in earnest in his life, but he prays for Kotarou’s safety. He can’t guarantee his own, unless he leaves.

He slammed the door to his old car, driving for so many hours until he’s far from the countryside and deep into the city. He doesn’t know how the streets even work here, or where his friend’s place is exactly. His parents never let him leave the bubble of the hill he grew up in. 

When he realized Nagano was so many miles away, he felt like he finally cut off the shackles that bound him for so long.

Sachirou was happy.

Sachirou’s first college boyfriend meets him at the library, intrigued by his intelligence and independence. He’s an older man, interested in the collection of books Sachirou has around him, who doesn’t mention that he lives vicariously through literary experiences through a cage.

Sachirou lets himself get pursued when he finally gives in, wondering if this was going to give him the happiness from love he’s read so much about. Open the cage a little more, so he can see the light.

But that too, is fleeting. Damaging in ways that he doesn’t anticipate out of naivete. 

_ You’re too cold. You only know the motions of being in love, but you don’t know what love is. You’re only good at pleasing me, but I don’t feel anything from you.  _

_ Are you even human? _

Sachirou closes his body to love, develops an aversion to the word. He stops having “boyfriends” and opts for more portable, convenient love. Partners? It doesn’t feel like that, when he’s always fighting and working against them with his words and touch. Pleasure isn’t the same as happiness. It’s the same vein as satisfying hunger.

People keep telling him he’s not human, that he’s missing all of the components that make up a complete boy. He’s too detached from the world of the living, and his only light comes in the form of animals.

Animals who already expect the worst from him and all of humanity, but warm up to Sachirou when he proves to them he’s not like the others. Where he’s safe to express the kind nature that he knows is his base essence. 

Animals that are honest, who are untainted by the ideals that Sachirou associates with humanity. Greed, lust for social power and pleasure, egoism. All ideals that caused his loved ones to extract as much capital from him even when he had no more wick to burn. Animals who know nothing about the society he was raised in.

Maybe that’s what he liked so much about Kourai. The light that climbed into his cage and breathed life directly into his lungs. Kourai, who loves him because he is more human than monster. Kourai, who he loves because he is more animal than man.

_ Wait. This feels wrong. I’m wrong. I’ve got it all fucked up— _

He thinks of the countless times that Kourai names what he hates about vampires and Sachirou thinks of humans in his life who exhibited those same traits. He thinks about what’s changed since he became a vampire of sorts. 

Not much, honestly. 

Sachirou still had the same feeling of existing between worlds, still unsure what love or happiness was, dreaming of freedom.

Freedom.

There’s too much traffic in his mind and he bangs his head against the stone, because he’s sure that the isolation is driving him insane. Pain reverberates through his temple while the same three words swim around in his head. Love, freedom, and happiness. He cycles through them like he cycles through his identity of “human” and “vampire.”

He’s stopped in his reverie when he hears a door open from outside his cell, slamming behind him. The first person he’s seen in weeks.

“Hey Curly,” a familiar voice echoes through the chamber. “Kita-san wants to see you.”

❂

“Hoshiumi, you’re absolutely fucking crazy. I’ll tear off the stitches holding your limbs together if you try to take on Inarizaki like this! I warned you about them going after you... and you weren’t fucking listening to me as usual!”

Hakuba Gao stands in front of the giant front entrance door of the mansion, a hulking two meter tall vampire who represents everything Hoshiumi hated in a person. 

“There’s a chance you were lying to me like the rest of you lot tend to do,” Hoshiumi snarls, throwing aside his jacket. He’s ready for a fight, even if he’s nowhere near his best. “Did you rat me out to Inarizaki? I bet you hunted in my feeding ground when I was away.”

Fights between vampires were ugly sights to behold and Hoshiumi had a bad reputation of getting tangled up in them. He doesn’t trust others of his kind. Vampires are born from power. Power struggles beget violence and greed.

“No one touched your grounds when you were away,” Gao barks back. His face is contorted with rage. “Do you really think so lowly of your own kind? Do you not trust a single one of us here?”

“I never have and I never will.”

Hoshiumi doesn’t care about the spectacle he’s making. He tears his shirt, exposing the countless scars along his body, spit forming at his mouth. Angry streaks of scar tissue circling his abdomen like vipers. “I’m built up from the lessons I’ve learned from all of you. I used to believe in stupid things like honor and trust that I learned from my human mother!” 

Gao falls silent, shocked by Hoshiumi’s revelation. Everyone’s gathered around them, watching in the shadows. A constellation of gleaming red eyes that scream to Hoshiumi that he’s surrounded instead of immersed. A galaxy of stars that shine the wrong color. His fists are balled up and he knows that each word that comes out of his mouth is dangerous.

“But all of you taught me that kind of logic is what will get me killed. What makes me weak! We vampires are born looking just like what we hunt. We think and feel, just like our prey. Sometimes when we drink good blood, we even  _ feel _ the memories and emotions of the people we consume. And none of you care about it. You just think of what will I eat tomorrow?” Hoshiumi shouts in an agonized voice, strained beyond belief. “How can I trust any one of you to understand me?”

“Hoshiumi-san,” Hinata speaks up, stepping out from the mass of people. He pushes away Kenma’s cautionary hand, assuring that he knows what he’s doing. “I was once human, saved from the brink of death by a vampire. You know this.”

Hoshiumi lowers his head, giving out a laugh. “Decades ago. Being human is such a distant memory to you that when I bit you all I saw was fog. You might know me better than anyone else here, but you’re the last person here to talk.”

Hoshiumi knows Hinata is the most cunning of their kind. Hinata knows how it feels to be small and helpless in the world that they’re from, knows weakness like the back of his hand. He builds his empire out of vampires to climb a ladder high enough to escape the pit of weakness he was born from. 

“Hoshiumi,” Aran speaks up warningly. “Don’t make enemies out of your own kind.”

“I already have, haven’t I?” Hoshiumi says, laughing as he turns around in a full circle. Eyes dancing madly to meet each pair like a challenge, as he accuses them all of being inherently terrible and power-hungry. “So why won’t you let me go?” 

_ I need to see him again. Dead or alive. You don’t understand me. _

“Because even if you keep fighting our offers to stay, you are still one of us,” Hinata says calmly and clearly. His eyes, once brown many years ago but now crimson-red, take in the image of a hunched over cherub who’s lost its wings. “You can hate yourself as much as you want, but it doesn’t change that you are a vampire just like everyone else in this room. Do you know why it’s such a grave sin to betray your own kind? Why the codes of vampirism exist?”

Hoshiumi doesn’t answer. He’s always turned a blind eye to the rules, not wanting to accept their existence. He refuses to sympathize with those who don’t bleed. Those with nothing to lose.

“Because there aren’t many of us around. Being a vampire in a world of humans is an incredibly lonesome experience that I’m sure you know,” Hinata says, smiling so sadly as he speaks from a place of understanding. “It’s why I was interested in you in the first place. Why I found everyone here, and chased Kageyama around the world. We’re the only people who understand each other. The codes of vampirism exist to preserve the goodness of humanity that we still have left. To stop us from destroying the world or the same traits that you associate so heavily with yourself, and us.”

_ I know. I know and I hate it. _

Hinata has said everything that he can. He knows from reading Hoshiumi’s eyes that he’s dealing with an unstoppable force, who refuses to settle for any of the options he’s laying forward. If they don’t kill him here, he’s going to find a way to get to Inarizaki’s fortress regardless of whether Sachirou is alive or not. He’s not going to rest until he knows.

Hinata can’t stomach killing Hoshiumi on the spot. He can’t consider it a victory when it only proves that Hoshiumi’s beliefs on the nature of vampires are correct. He makes his decision.

“Hoshiumi-san. You know that if we let you go, you’re not strong enough to take them on even at your best. It’s a suicide mission,” Hinata says. A suicide mission, like chasing Kageyama once was.

_ I know that. I’m fine with dying if he’s already dead.  _

“Letting you go is the same as killing you. I don’t want to kill you,” Hinata looks over his shoulder at Kageyama, who gives a knowing nod. He averts his eyes back to Hoshiumi, tracing the scars on his abdomen with his gaze. He recognizes the damage he’s inflicted, recognizing the pattern of his own nails on rivers of scars on Hoshiumi’s torso. 

Hinata sees the loneliest man in the world in Hoshiumi, who was given a glimpse of love and driven mad by the sensation. A weapon tired of being used. A relic of his own beliefs that he’s since amended. 

_ Hoshiumi-san. You believe in these things because I used to believe in it too, and I taught you the world. That vampires were monsters and a cursed existence. But I’ve changed. Something in you has changed to, and I want to see if it’s the same reason. _

“So if you surrender your ideals and trust us, I’ll go with you to Inarizaki’s fortress and open a path for you. Kageyama, Aran, and I will go with you,” Hinata says quietly, turning to his trusted comrades. He’s placing his best on the line, stacking his chips to see how Hoshiumi will react to his offer. A test.

“Surrender to you?” Hoshiumi chokes out the words like he’s gasping. He’s already humiliated from being given a chance of life at Hinata’s mercy, and mortified at the idea of asking for help. 

Hoshiumi bites the inside of his cheek, hard. Accepting the help of other vampires in other circumstances was something inconceivable to him moments before, but time is of essence. He’s so sure about his feelings.

He loves Sachirou to the point that surrender is a small price to pay. His beliefs, his long-withstanding rivalry that rests on a battle of concepts, is worth losing for such a grand gesture. Hoshiumi’s fists unclench. His shoulders relax. 

“If that’s all it takes to let me go,” Hoshiumi tilts his head to face Hinata, fighting back a smile of relief. He expected to incur the full range of Hinata’s wrath, complete with a fight that his body had been tensing up for. He’s free to be Hoshiumi Kourai in front of Hinata Shouyou at last, no longer needing to show his only his best. 

“Then I’ll surrender. And if you’re right, Hinata Shouyou about the nature of vampires and prove to me that we’re not the most loathsome pieces of shit on the face of the planet, I’ll tell everyone that I’ve lost to you. Once and for all,” Hoshiumi points directly at him. “And if I get to see Sachirou alive again, I’ll be your bitch.”

Hoshiumi walks away, laughing.

Hinata’s suspicions are confirmed. He laughs, too. 

Hoshiumi Kourai is so in love that he’s discovered the option of surrender. 

❂

_**ii. WHERE DO YOU SIT AT THE MONSTER'S BANQUET?** _

Sachirou is bathed generously and clothed with care by none other than Miya Osamu, prompting him to ask if he’s being prepared for slaughter or something more nefarious.

“Still cheeky as always, aren’t ya?” Osamu says, glad that his twin is nowhere to be found. He wipes the side of Sachirou’s face with a damp towel. Unlike Atsumu, he finds Sachirou’s antics somewhat amusing when he’s not fully bloodlusted during a hunt. “You’re an honored guest of Kita-san’s tonight for dinner. That’s all there is to it.”

“And how do I know that I’m not going to be part of that dinner?” Sachirou asks slyly. He’s sure there’s some hidden caveat he doesn’t know. 

Smart ass, Osamu thinks, still keeping his pleasantly mild-mannered disposition. “You might be, depending on how it goes,” he purses his lips together.  _ You’ll get what’s comin’ to you when you meet Kita-san. _

Osamu pulls a jade mirror out of his apron so that Sachirou can look at his reflection for the first time in a week. His short brown hair has grown back remarkably fast, but the locks aren’t long enough to curl up. He barely recognizes himself without a head of wavy hair, his face pallid from lack of light. “At least I’ll die pretty,” he says dismissively, much to Osamu’s annoyance.

_ I can’t call him ugly because he looks pretty similar to me and he knows it. _

“You’re welcome,” Osamu replies flatly. “Consider it an apology for last time’s mess.”

“Don’t forget me okay?” Sachirou says, winking. He really is frivolous, but only to the people he wants to keep at arm’s length.

Osamu makes a mental note to ask Atsumu if they might’ve had a lost triplet running around.

❂

The universe is a dining hall. Interchangeable. They proceed down a stone vestibule decorated in folds of deep crimson velvet that winds like an esophagus, before being deposited into an open space. A faint light radiates from the center of the room, a being that casts no shadow sits on a throne. 

In Kita Shinsuke’s domain, the only finite element is light. The walls were so far apart that light couldn’t reach the ends, casting the illusion of an infinite space. The obsidian table that stretches across the room has no end, lined evenly with empty hexagonal seats that jut from the endless earth. Kita sits at the divide. His eyes are the essence of red itself. 

_ If architecture could drive one insane _ , Sachirou follows the path of light, leading him to a seat before Kita. His mind, once buzzing with questions is suddenly mute in the face of a black hole. 

“Hirugami,” Kita speaks with no hesitation, each word sounding to the beat of time. “Do you believe in God?”

_ God. _ The second character of Sachirou’s own last name. “神”, “- _ gami _ ” he lets it hang at the tip of his tongue, suspending it over a pool of his beliefs.

“I can’t be sure,” Sachirou answers finally. He plays his cards safely.

“I don’t believe in the gods,” Kita replies. Not coldly, not accusingly. Stating a fact. “Most vampires don’t, as you can see. The idea of a God is constructed in due part because what they fear is punishable by death. Vampires do not die like humans. So what ensures vampires live properly then?”

Sachirou recalls the shadow that passes Kourai’s eyes when he utters the name of the vampire who stands before him now. A shadow he doesn’t see often.

“Fear,” he doesn’t miss a beat. “Fear of a higher power that can bring an end to what they value.” Sachirou replaces the word “love” with “value”, feeling too foolish to say it in front of Kita Shinsuke.

“Fear and the desire to live harmoniously among your own kind. You were born human, were you not? Human children learn nurture, before nature changes them,” Kita says, before stopping. “Do you think Hoshiumi Kourai is someone who operates with the desire to protect his own kind?”

No. 

Hoshiumi hates other vampires. He only fears the ones stronger than him. Sachirou knows this with all of his heart, but his lips can’t bring him to carry out that betrayal. Agreeing marks Kourai for death.

“No,” Kita unknowingly spares him, cutting into the silence like a knife. “And is fear enough to subdue him?”

Sachirou remembers Hoshiumi walking through the streets after mangling Osamu alive. Breaking down the windows of buildings that stored blood without a care. Ripping into them, to feed them both. Hoshiumi, who froze at the mere sight of Kita in the city square.

“It once was,” Sachirou answers, reaching a point where he fears silence will incite a greater punishment.

“So you understand the role I must play among my own kind,” Kita says gravely, folding his hands on his lap. He laughs softly, startling Sachirou who sees him clearly for the first time in the light.

The man who does not believe in God, forced to play God for the preservation of his kind. When Sachirou’s eyes reach Kita, miles upwards he sees an understanding between them.

“That’s why you’ve kept me alive for so long,” Sachirou speaks with certainty, unbecoming of subjects that usually face Kita in the dining hall. He doesn’t see Kita like how vampires do. He understands they exist in the same realm of non-deities, and the knowledge frees his reservations. “You’re not omniscient, but you have to carry out a judgment and sentence to keep the order of things, which you can’t do until you have answers.”

_ So my life, and Kourai-kun’s rides on the outcome of this trial. _

Sachirou hopes he’s not wrong. He can’t imagine a rebirth, even an ugly one, if he’s immolated on the spot by Kita Shinsuke’s gaze.

“You’re right. This whole situation has really thrown a spanner in my gears. The crux of it is, I don’t know what you are. You exist outside of my domain. If you were human, you’d be dead. If you were a vampire, you’d be imprisoned. But the twins neglected to tell me that you’re neither. Not even both,  _ neither _ .”

Kita smiles. It’s rare for him to be able to speak like this, to be seen as a vampire, no embellishments.  _ He sure is good. _ He gets up from his throne, the first time in centuries that he’s relinquished his king-like role in this room.

The lights follow him. Traveling to the ends of the walls and illuminating them. Infinity is just an illusion. Kita Shinsuke is just a man, who takes a seat in front of him for a conversation, not a trial.

“Welcome to the Monster’s Banquet,” Kita procures two glasses from under the table and pours red liquid to the brim. Human’s blood. Food for monsters, identical to the substance that runs through Sachirou’s veins, extracted days before.

Sachirou drinks as the glass is set before him. Cannibalizing himself without a question. Smiling, a closed-eyed grin.

❂

Kourai has the same dream every night. Of a boy who’s shaven bald like an ascetic, standing by a wall, hands dripping with blood. Filling the air with the same fragrance he associates with a single evening in the spring, the day that he fell. The scent is overpowering, but the sight of the boy and his lightless dark-brown eyes stops Hoshiumi in his tracks.

When he sees the boy, he forgets he’s a monster. Hoshiumi takes a step closer to him. Flowers grow every step he takes, leading him to the broken boy. He takes the small boy’s hands in his, kneeling down to make himself smaller.

Hoshiumi, who changes for no one, becomes Kourai who sheds his feathers for love. He decays, until he is a boy even smaller than the one before him, leaking feathers and petals.

“Sachirou,” Kourai always says. Twelve years old, hands dripping with someone else’s blood. “I wish we could have saved each other sooner... I wish that we came from the same worlds from the start.”

He means it with all of his heart. What a different life they’d both live. 

Sachirou smiles. When it’s real, he smiles with his eyes closed. He tightens his broken hands that rest on Kourai’s balled up fists, like he’s cupping his hands around a small flycatcher. Lovely in the spring, and gentle.

“You can still find me. There’s still time left.”

❂

Kita never acts without reason. His reasons for taking Hirugami Sachirou captive were twofold. First:  _ to lure Hoshiumi Kourai to his already-decided death within Inarizaki’s walls.  _ Hoshiumi had disrupted order of their kind, lashing unexpectedly at his brethren and acting rashly in a way that threatened their coexistence with humans. Second:  _ to determine the unknown force more potent than fear that would get Hoshiumi Kourai to act out like this.  _ The latter had everything to do with Sachirou.

The series of events as he sees it, knowing Hoshiumi Kourai, is simple at the surface. Hoshiumi, who’s been at odds with the Inarizaki coven since the incident with his mother, interrupted the twins in the middle of a hunt. Natural behavior, driven by pride, a mixture of vengeance and desire to expand territory. Fair game. 

Kita doesn’t even question if Hoshiumi finished off his stolen prey when Atsumu relates the story. It’s not the first time Hoshiumi has thieved kills from other vampires. He kills and feeds quickly, always carefully snatching up vagrants or low-profile sources of blood that won’t be reported when they vanish in thin air. 

So he’s surprised when Osamu returns from an outing one day— broken and clinging to life— claiming that not only did Hoshiumi attack him completely unprompted, but that  _ he did it in defense of a human. _ It’s then when Kita knows something’s gone horribly wrong, when he can’t predict Hoshiumi’s behavior. He hears news that a blood bank has been robbed, the CCTV footage not showing the perpetrator even when the windows are smashed on camera. 

Hoshiumi takes more blood than Kita expects, usually a light eater. He’s taken enough to feed a family.

And when the time comes to execute Hoshiumi Kourai, another spanner is thrown in Kita’s plans. He plans on killing a vampire and feeding on the human with him. Except, Sachirou isn’t human. He’s not exactly a vampire either. He exists outside the realm of Kita’s judgment, and somehow holds the power to make Hoshiumi disobey rules like there’s no such thing as a Kita Shinsuke. Not to mention, Hoshiumi manages to get away with the help of more unknown variables.

When a vampire doesn’t behave according to Kita’s predictions and against the code of their kind, he’s left with no choice but to shut them down. 

_ It’s nothing personal _ , he explains to Sachirou, stressing that he’s not doing all of this out of desire to inflict a moral code on everyone. He’s merely concerned with his own survival, the survival of his coven, and that hinges on the survival of their species as a whole. There are so few vampires, that whatever affects one has a ripple effect through the community. The business of others can become his own too quickly.

“The foundation of everything lies in the decisions that accumulate over time. The order that I must strive for to preserve vampirekind and with it, my own existence, is contingent on it. That’s why I must investigate what I’m dealing with thoroughly, before passing judgment. You’re my unknown,” Kita says.

Hoshiumi’s would-be prey— for reasons that exist outside his realm of comprehension— sits in front of him, alive. Diffusing a scent so palatable, Kita can see why Osamu confused him for a human. Drinking blood for sustenance, like a monster.

“You’d be disappointed to know the reason,” Sachirou leans back against his seat, no back to support him. Suspended between balance and falling. “It’s so foolish, I’m averse to saying it outloud. I would rather you bite me and find out.”

“I figured as much,” Kita tries to follow Sachirou’s words with logic, even where it may not apply.

Sachirou knows the stakes are stacked against him and Hoshiumi when it comes to pure logic, his own game. He knows what the options are, because he’s confident in what he knows.

He knows he loves Kourai. He knows, without a single doubt in the world, that Kourai loves him. Even seconds before he bit into Kourai’s flesh, he already knew it.

If Kita kills him here, Hoshiumi would still come running. He’d be taken down and killed, according to a sentence decided on before he arrived.

If Kita lets him live, Hoshiumi would still come running. He’d be taken down and killed, according to a sentence decided on before he arrived. Sachirou would have to watch, and the thought pains him in a way he can’t stomach. He’d be released into the world. Two more options open up.

Kita sees him as human, and then he’s fair game for vampires. He may be granted immunity, but he’ll die anyways. There exist other vampires in Tokyo, and Sachirou’s told he’s like a beacon for death.

Kita sees him as a vampire, and inducts him into his own family. He will hate living here more than any other cage he’s been in, and maybe one of the twins will snap and predate him. Even as a vampire, he’s lesser status than the others, his death inconsequential.

Sachirou sees a construct of vines, an iron wall with no way out. All he can do is bide his time.

“I’m thinking of ways to be interesting to you, because if everything plays out like we both imagine it will, Kourai-kun will come to die within your fortress’s walls,” Sachirou outlines his glass with his index finger, smearing blood over the rim.

“I don’t keep people alive because they’re interesting,” Kita replies pointedly. “I’m still trying to assess what you are, and if what you are poses a threat.”

_ So he doesn’t fall for decoys or distracts flitting around. Maybe in another life, we’d be great friends, _ Sachirou thinks, even if it’s not the time. He’s facing a dilemma more puzzling than any Shogi or Go game he’s ever played.

It’s his turn to ask questions. He’s answered all of Kita’s.

“Why did you leave me waiting for so long before we could meet face to face?”

“The second reason I kept you alive. Whatever is more powerful than Hoshiumi’s fear of repercussions likes in who you are. I wanted to give you time to know how to answer those questions. People don’t often think about who they are until they’re completely alone, forced to engage in nothing but introspection,” Kita outlines the fairness of his methods. “I give people the chance to defend themselves. You’ve done a good job.”

“What’s stopping you from killing me, right here and right now?”

“You haven’t done anything wrong, save for existing as an anomaly that confuses me. I don’t kill meaninglessly. I kill humans for food. I kill vampires for disobeying the rules that keep us together,” Kita arches an eyebrow. “I told you, I’m not a God. I have a conscience.”

“Oh, so what keeps you from disobeying  _ that  _ conscience?”

“I don’t want my Granny to be upset. She still believes in the Gods,” Kita’s response is plain and completely unexpected, but suddenly Sachirou sees a tangent he can relate to.

He remembers how he lives his life, the ties of filial piety still pulling at him when he remembers his dead grandmother, and how she’s theoretically watching him from heaven.  _ Does that make her a God?  _ Sachirou has a feeling Kita wouldn’t enjoy that response, and nips it in the bud.

“Do you have any more questions for me? I guess if you don’t plan on killing me, I’ll just have to accept life for what it is now,” Sachirou says, putting his hands in his lap. “You know everything about me that I’ve told you, and how I interact with vampires and humans. I’ll kill humans if I get released back into the general public, a danger for our kind. So I have no choice but to live among vampires, where I’m in between  _ friend  _ and  _ food _ .”

Kita arches an eyebrow. “Is that the kind of existence you want to live?”

“If I can live with Kourai-kun, but you’re planning on killing him off no matter how this goes. If I could choose an existence to live, I’d wish to be given the option to choose a world to belong in. There’s no way to change that, unless Miya Atsumu wants to spare me,” Sachirou says.

“Atsumu won’t,” Kita replies quietly. He knows Atsumu like the back of his hand, angry for being spited not once, but twice on behalf of his twin. “But I’m the one who changed Osamu and Atsumu. Their venom is the same as mine.”

“Does that mean you could turn me into a vampire?” Sachirou never considered this option in the realm of possibilities.

“Or a human.”

“At what cost?”

“My precious time. The risk that you may turn out to be delinquent, or that once you’re human, a liability. I’ll have to escort you out myself. Lots of hungry vampires within these walls.”

Sachirou never expects to have a choice when it comes to the state of his humanity. He expects it to be forcibly taken from him like it was months ago, or discarded the more he drinks blood and lives like a vampire.

_ I want to see Kourai-kun again. _

“What’s your judgment on that?”

“I’ve been judging you the whole time. Now that you know that this is an option, I’m curious to see what you will choose, and why. It’s a decision that I will execute, based on what you tell me to do. Where do you sit at the Monster’s Banquet?”

Humanity and vampirism. Decisions made based on happiness. Sachirou envisions paths opening up to him, lives that he could live. When he’s human, he’s inhuman. When he’s a monster, Kourai embraces him telling him he’s the most human sight to behold.

Sachirou draws his conclusion, his days of isolation making the answer clearer than ever. “It doesn’t matter what I choose, does it? I’m built upon everything it’s taken to get me to this very point in life, and whether I leave human or vampire doesn’t matter so much. I’ll be the same person,” he says, knowing that Kourai won’t like his answer. “But if I had to choose, I’d like to be a vampire. If I’ve learned anything from being around vampires, it’s that monsters and humans are the same, in different forms. Interchangeable in nature. Terrible and wonderful.”

_ Being a vampire means that I might get a chance to see Kourai-kun again. Even if he’ll reject me in such a state. _

Kita likes his response. They are more like souls than he’s bargained. “Lucky you, to be able to experience both worlds,” Kita says. He craves the taste of Sachirou’s memories more than ever, only having lived the life of a monster. 

Kita is on Sachirou’s side of the table, leaning over him, hands running down his neck and resting at his waist. He feels Sachirou’s pulse against his long fingertips, a new realm to cut into with the knives protruding from his mouth, past his bottom lip. “Lucky  _ us, _ ” Kita whispers.

Kita plants a kiss on his neck.

A kiss that transforms the flesh under his lips like a promise.

❂

**_iii. HABIT IS SECOND NATURE_ **

In your most desperate ploy for happiness yet, you make a decision to forgo your humanity.

You are broken down to be rebuilt. Trapped in the shell of your body, while you’re torn apart by the forces of chaotic ascension and creation, descent and destruction. You must break before you are put back together, to adopt a new form.

You don’t cry. You don’t scream. The pain is cumulative and familiar. A reminder of what you give up. You will wake up bloodless, hollowed out, but alive. Each pulse is a countdown to your last. Each breath scrapes your lungs dry.

The end releases a stream of adrenaline that jerks the threads holding your body together taut, a final time. Your vessels run completely dry. Your lips are parched, cracked. Your ribs rattle a final time, to your heart’s last cry before it remains still, a quicksilver ingot that anchors you down. 

You feel more alive than you’ve ever been. You brush with death a few times, pushing away its wretched hands from your neck. Not today. Not until you see him again.

You re-emerge a final time, head tilted back, neck one degree from snapping. Break through a membrane that encases your body like sheet metal. Your fingernails chip from breaking the sac, and you rear your head for the first time, like a half-molted bird with its mouth hanging out. Begging for nectar, searching for blood. Clutching at your abdomen, while your bones shift into positions where they’ll remain for several eternities. An ugly rebirth.

But you are alive. Your senses are live wires. You see a panoramic world around you in new dimensions, you see with your breath, you taste with your eyes. You’re granted all of the powers that you were promised, and harness them. You, who once lived an ordinary life give birth to the extraordinary out of love. 

You want to stop and revel in your different senses, your new beauty, but you haven’t forgotten what’s brought you here. The clock never stills, each beat resounding in your head like the five days you spent in isolation. You’re still on a timer. You’ve internalized the passage of time like it’s the heartbeat you used to have.

Every minute that passes where you two are apart adds to the odds you two will get out alive.

You meet your Maker, who is just a man. His silver hair is illuminated in the faint light, the tips of his hair stained like ink, admiring his own creation. You thank him for the invitation. You ask him what you can do now.

Everything, he says. 

But expect the consequences. 

❂

With one breath, Sachirou sees the entire fortress of Inarizaki. The air he breathes in constructs a picture in his head, the scents manifest as colors and auras. He’s about to run to the entrance, when he sees a pulsing nova of an aura tucked away several floors below him.

An aura that sends him tearing through the corridors of the fortress without a second thought. A nova that burns weaker than the one he knows. A song muffled like it’s being smothered in a bag made of thick hide. He knows he’s shaving off his precious time

What chases this presence isn’t just him. It’s Kourai, who lives through him, housed in his soul ever since Sachirou pierced his skin with his fangs. He and Kourai tear apart the iron door together, Sachirou bears the strength of two vampires. 

He tears back the door and faces two cowering women. Their eyes are a dull rouge, their faces pale like moonlight. Terrified at the sudden introduction of such a startling, unfamiliar presence.

Sachirou finds Hoshiumi. Hoshiumi Asa. He recognizes the other woman from Hoshiumi’s memories. Hitomi didn’t die after all, like Kourai believed.  _ I have so much to tell you when we see each other again, _ Sachirou can’t stop thinking about Kourai. 

He reaches out to her like she’s the mother he never had. Gentle when he takes her into his arms, and she receives him because she senses her child nested somewhere in his soul.

“Let’s greet Kourai-kun together.  _ Okaa-san _ .”

❂

Hoshiumi smashes through the stone doors with the brute force of a horned bull. He’s leading the charge, running far faster than the powerful vampires in his entourage. He lands on the ground, shattering the tiles. Frantic, while he sniffs the air.

He doesn’t smell Sachirou anywhere. He can’t believe his extra-sensory perception would ever fail him. He hesitates for a second, and a second is enough for him to lose everything.

Hoshiumi doesn’t see he’s surrounded, that he’s the centerpoint of a star formed by five of Inarizaki’s soldiers, lunging at him like a five pronged trident. He’s a second from losing his head, but there’s another spanner that lodges itself in the gears of fate. Make it three more.

Kageyama Tobio springs like a safety net to cover Hoshiumi’s grievous mistake. Hinata Shouyou and Ojiro Aran are right behind him. Hoshiumi isn’t alone. He’ll be a stronger adversary than they bargained for.

“Hoshiumi-san, I told you to wait for us,” Hinata shouts, knocking aside rubble to clear a path. He stops, noticing Hoshiumi’s expression.

Horror, not fear.

Hoshiumi looks up, hands trembling. “I don’t… I don’t feel Sachirou anywhere,” he says. Everything is falling apart inside of him and he’s struggling to stand up. His aura is darkening at an alarming rate in Hinata’s vision.

What a terrifying force of nature love is. Minutes ago, Hoshiumi was the strongest that they had ever seen him, breaking down a proofed door like it was made of paper, not stone. Now he stands before them, so weak that Hinata imagines him crumbling into pieces where he stands.

“Hoshiumi,” Aran urges, putting a hand on the vampire’s shoulder. It’s as he feared. He didn’t expect Kita to keep Sachirou alive, there was no discernible reason to. “Keep it together.”

Hoshiumi looks up at his adversaries. He knows them all by name. Miya Atsumu, who stares jeeringly at him. Suna Rintarou, who manipulates his enemies psychologically— the contortionist. Ginjima Hitoshi, Oomimi Ren, Akagi Michinari, some of the strongest fighters among their kind. All recently fed. Their filthy scent, tinged with aftertones of the spring.

“‘Samu bled him for Kita-san. A few hours ago,” Atsumu says, cocking his hip. He’s relishing the change of expression in Hoshiumi’s eyes. “I’ve won the hunt. I have no interest in fighting you Hoshiumi. You’re a dead man.”

Hoshiumi’s breathing is ragged. His eyes are orbs that reflect no light. He’s sinking, the ground giving way with his knees. He’ll never see Sachirou again. Never feel those warm brown eyes beaming with love when they look at him, and him alone. His springtime-scented boy, who becomes a still painting when he sleeps, his hair falling in waves that shine a reddish-brown in the light. Gone, because his own undoing.

_ I shouldn’t have taken you out with me to see the lights at Christmastime. _

_ I shouldn’t have fallen in love with you, I’m not built to love. _

_ I shouldn’t have taken you home with me that night. _

_ I shouldn’t have watched you for months. _

_ I shouldn’t have fallen in love with you. _

_ I shouldn’t have met you. _

_ I. _

“Shouyou-kun, Tobio-kun!” Atsumu steps forward, speaking out to his true opponent. He points at the freak duo, a smile curling around his lip. “You’re who I really want to fight today. I have no time for bygones. Thanks for coming to meet me. I would have never found you otherwise.”

Atsumu strips off his clothes, revealing scars and brands down his body. Hallmarks and tallies from battles lost and won. The character for “love” is branded on his arm. Love of the hunt.

He steps forward into the ring, beckoning for Hinata and Kageyama.

Hoshiumi is the one who meets him.

❂

_ “If Hoshiumi Kourai lays a hand on one of my vampires, he dies.” _

_ “I understand.” _

❂

An unstoppable force meets an immovable object. It’s an over-studied, classic paradox that’s become somewhat of a cliché of a scenario that is a fallacy in itself. Assuming that both are implicitly indestructible, the existence of an immovable object implies that there exists no such thing as an unstoppable force, because forces that meet the immovable object will be stopped and vice versa. Inertia. 

When Hoshiumi Kourai springs into the air, with an intent to kill so power that he leaves a shockwave behind him that shatters stone. Creates blades in his wake that announce to everyone in the room that in the air, he cannot be stopped. He is the unstoppable force, with nothing to hold him back.

He will kill Miya Atsumu like it’s etched in the tablet of fate. He will tear Miya Atsumu and everyone who comes in between them, friend or foe, and everyone who wants to preserve their lives will be forced to watch.

Then, once his mission is over, his immunity will decay with the realization of what he’s done. He’s lost the will to live, revenge executed by turning his body into a blade of vengeance, and he will be nothing but an empty vessel that will beg for death, arms outstretched. He who is a fool that lives for love, dies for love.

Kita Shinsuke waits a room away. Ready to bring down the beast. He’s reluctant because in this stone fortress, there’s no one that understands Hoshiumi more. Maybe except Sachirou.

_ Where are you, Hirugami? You’re going to lose him for good. _

Sachirou relives the day that Kourai met him. Ever since he’s known that he’s carried the full weight of Kourai’s love, he doesn’t stop thinking about it. Kourai was lonely for so long, and hope came to him in the form of a strange boy who didn’t know he existed.  _ How sad. _ Kourai, who spends his whole life waiting, but never waited for.

That day, Sachirou breaks away from his friends. He walks under the flowering cherry blossoms, watching petals fall when he sees something small, but too large to be a petal fall out of a tree. He runs to receive it in his hands, with reflexes granted from his years playing sports.

A bird falls out of a tree, mangled from a fight. Bleeding, thrashing, wings bent out of shape. It screeches in his palms, scraping gashes into his fingers and stabs him with its beak. They’re in shock, pain, hurt and betrayed. Sachirou gets it. He really does.

The bird has stars for hair and rubies for eyes. He bites Sachirou over and over again, sharp nails digging into unfamiliar flesh, screaming. Wings are claws, bent into violent shapes that find his neck. He doesn’t recognize who he’s fighting.

“You must be scared, aren’t you? That’s why you’re beating your wings against me like this. Don’t worry. You’re safe with me now. I’ll take care of you.”

Sachirou remembers the words from that night. He hopes that the monster in his arms remembers them too.

“ _ Kourai-kun. _ ”

At the sound of his name, a shudder runs through Kourai’s body. Turning every scale on the monster’s hide, like he’s been christened with a name that he forgot. He stops screaming, stops fighting, and he’s never been unstoppable in the way Sachirou has never truly been immovable.

_ No… _

No more brown eyes. Deep, vivid red, like he’s just been born again. The springtime is over, and Sachirou is cold like the winter that Kourai tries to escape. His hair no longer curls, it’s rough and coarse like tree bark. But it’s Sachirou.

“Sachirou?”

“It’s me, Kourai-kun.”

“You’ve changed.”

“That I have. You hate it, don’t you?”

“You’re a vampire.”

“I know you came here for a human.”

“I came for you.”

Kourai’s changed too. It’s why he’s here, with allies and not alone. Hinata Shouyou was right after all. Sachirou’s humanity, which used to be something so precious to him, doesn't matter anymore.

“Well, you’re getting me. And two more vampires. I’ll explain. There’s so much I have to tell you, but let’s get out of here.”

“Where do we go?”

“Home.”

❂

Kita Shinsuke watches all of this unfold, behind a curtain he’s lifted halfway. He sees Asa and Hitomi, small behind Sachirou, who he sees as one of his most mysterious creations. He’s relieved. Relieved that in this banquet of extraordinary monsters that he can predict like he has a sixth sense, there’s someone ordinary like him, who takes the tangles of a mess and ties everything neatly together. He has confidence that Hirugami Sachirou is enough for a boy wonder like Hoshiumi Kourai. Every bird needs a safe place to rest its wings, or else they’ll go mad. That’s what Hirugami is to Hoshiumi.

❂

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Miya Atsumu can’t believe his eyes. He’s been cheated of an opponent, his interest in Hoshiumi Kourai had finally peaked when it looked like the vampire was about to take him on at full power. He’s not even sure what’s happened, Hirugami moving so fast.

“Atsumu-san,” Hinata Shouyou rolls up his sleeves, his tongue sticking out. “Let’s call a truce and have a friendly battle. To strengthen our muscles. What do you think, Kageyama?”

Kageyama doesn’t respond, but his eyes are narrow with the thrill of battle. It’s not every day he gets to spar with a vampire of his calibre. He senses strength all around the room, taking his position in the ball.

“Hinata Shouyou,” Kourai looks over his shoulder, his bloodlust gone. He glances at Sachirou, and knows that there’s one more thing in order before he makes his grand exit. “Our deal. I admit my defeat to you. The nature of humans and vampires are the same.”

Hinata grins, turning to Kourai. “You get it now, don’t you? Now promise you two won’t be strangers and come visit.”

_ So this is Hinata Shouyou. Boy, he sure is impressive. _ Sachirou waves with a cheerful smile. “Sorry we didn’t get more time to talk. I’m Hirugami Sachirou. Hoshiumi’s friend.”

Kourai nudges Sachirou sharply in the ribs, annoyed. “More than friends.”

Aran and Hinata both laugh, grateful that there exists someone in the world brave enough to bring Hoshiumi’s ego down a few notches. “Oh yeah, Hoshiumi-san,” Hinata says victoriously, his hands on his hips. “Say it.”

“Say what?” Kourai scowls.

“You’re my bitch!”

Everyone’s laughing at him.

“Absolutely not,” Kourai shoots an angry look over his shoulder. Hinata’s become pluckier since returning overseas.“I only said it back then because I was desparate. Keep your win. You cheeky little—”

Sachirou pulls at the hem of Kourai’s pants roughly, the only garment he wears standing among monsters. “Ah, Kourai-kun. Not in front of your mother.”

“My—”

Kourai is so caught up in the moment that he doesn’t notice his mother and Hitomi standing behind him, eyes caked with tears. He sees her, and the world comes to a halt on its axis. 

He drops his hands and runs toward her. Asa is frail under Kourai’s strength. Kourai, with the embrace of a man but the tears of a little boy all over again, melts under his mother’s touch. Defeated for the third time today. The reunion of mother and son happens feet away from a monster’s ball that breaks out in the entrance, fang against fang on one end of the room, arms around bodies on the other end. 

Like two sides of the same coin.

❂

Asa forgives him. Wholly. Hitomi tells Kourai to call her “Mother.” She understands him now, and loves Asa, who loves him. They chatter away in the living room, bridging the gap left between years and isolation. Kourai is relieved to find that he didn’t kill Hitomi, but shortly after changing her, she had been spirited away by Kita Shinsuke before attacking their neighbors.

Asa says that she and Hitomi had each other. Kourai is grateful that his mother didn’t suffer all of those years alone, and neglects telling her about his loneliness. She can already sense it from him. Mid-conversation, Kourai pulls aside Sachirou to ask him to put away all of his magazines and posters before she enters his room, and he walks away laughing.

There are other rooms in the abandoned building he lives in to make room for others. He lives in a part of the city that’s basically been rendered a ghost town. The owner of the property died years ago, but the rights to the place belonged to their son overseas who was stubborn about ownership and never relinquished it, thus granting it immunity from demolition, he explains. Hitomi and Asa can live next door. That way, they live as a coven, but still have their own spaces. It’s almost too idyllic to be true.

Asa says that she’ll try to write to Akitomo again. See if they can be a family again, or at least some semblance of it. Sachirou manages to fix a wound in Kourai’s heart that he never thinks will be stitched together again, giving him the gift of a mother again.

“Why did you go find my mom? It’s of no gain to you,” Kourai asks, when Asa is gone. Sachirou is in the kitchen, tossing out the human food he’s stored before. He doesn’t have a taste for it anymore.

“Kourai-kun’s happiness makes me happy,” Sachirou says in a singsong voice. He is happy. “But also, it makes me happy to help others. I guess it’s why I like to help animals and people so much. Once I get used to being around humans again, I want to try going back to school.”

Kourai raises his eyebrows. “School? You think you can do that?”

“Yeah,” Sachirou leans against the counter. He’s got all of the time in the world to make decisions about his life now. Free from the burdens of others, free to start over again. “I’d have to work up to it, but I think I’ll be able to play human pretty well. It’s second nature to me.”

“I see. Maybe you can take me with you someday,” Kourai walks up to him, taking his hand. Weighing his palm in his, playfully. Being with Sachirou is so easy. “What was your major anyways?”

“Veterinary medicine.”

“Ah,” Kourai laughs, stars in his eyes. “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

❂

“You sure let them off easily. I’m surprised, Kita.”

Aran paces across Kita’s domain, turning on all the lights. They’d just finished dinner after watching the twins and the “freak combo” duke it out, Osamu unable to hold back from joining the fun. Fighting until dawn, never letting up until they’d exhausted all the faculties. The monsters are asleep in another room, looking like children curled up in sleeping bags.

“I’m surprised too,” Kita says. Aran is the one of the few people he’s able to talk to as an equal, enjoying his company as of late. They’re close enough to hold hands. Kita wonders why Aran doesn’t just do it already. “Surprised at how this all turned out.

“I’ve never seen you so reckless before. Were you that confident that it’d go according to plan?” Aran says, never holding back his honesty. It’s what Kita appreciates about him so much.

“No, and that’s what worries me. I was much more reserved than I’ve ever been before to execute decisions. The results were also a fluke,” Kita looks up at the finite ceiling, thinking about his hesitance along the way. “What if this happens again, and everything that I’ve built up for comes toppling down like Rome?”

Aran stares at Kita. Silver hair bathed in light like he’s from Heaven, wearing a clueless expression like he’s been dazed. He laughs. It’s what he loves the most about Shinsuke. Ethereal and earthly in one. “No need to be a philosopher about it. You looked into Hirugami’s mind when you bit him right? You were touched by his story, plain and simple. If seeing them happy makes you more happy than executing justice, then I think you should let yourself be happy for once!”

Kita laughs in response, nodding. “You’re right. I  _ was  _ very touched. I really was rooting for them ‘til the very end. What a funny thing love is. Makes me wonder what other human emotions I overlook in pursuit of living so properly.”

“You’re not a machine, Kita,” Aran says softly. This time, he touches Kita’s hand. “We’re not machines, and that’s what makes life worth living. You, me, the twins. Inarizaki. Hoshiumi, Hirugami, those monsters, humans, we’re all made up of emotions, not just instinct.”

“I think that’s grand,” Kita says, his voice filling the room with mirth. The light reaches his eyes and paints him and Aran like two shadowless statues for display. “We’re vessels for such wonderful memories and experiences. That’s what people mean when they talk about ‘heart’, isn’t it? Not that blood-pumping organ. I see it now.”

Kita’s happiness is infectious. Aran’s lips part to let laughter escape from the chambers of his body. Free.

❂

Sachirou and Kourai fall into each other, wasting no time to get reacquainted. Lovers that have once tasted loss become crashing waves that come together harder than ever. Hold tighter, and grasp their second life by the wings with more vigor. 

They’re in Kourai’s room, lying in a bed of red spider-lilies, draped in honey-colored lights with the television playing a black-and-white movie in the background. Not a corner of darkness anywhere in sight, no more shadows.

Kourai leans over him, takes him into his hands, and inhales.

“How do I smell?” Sachirou asks. Eyes blazing red and shining.

“Filthy,” Kourai replies. He cries, but his chest sings with life at the sight of his love beneath him. Sachirou is more alive than he’s ever seen him, blossoming with each touch. He’ll have to get to work to reclaim what’s his. “ _ Everywhere. _ ”

“You’ll love me anyways. All my ugliness.”

Sachirou doesn't ask it like a question. He knows from how Kourai responds to his touch, how he looks at him right now that no transformation will change the love they've come to learn from one another through hard lessons.

"Of course. Like you love mine."

Kourai loves like a turbulent storm. Sachirou is the embodiment of the calm that welcomes him at the end of it. The one who sees him for who he is in all of his completeness: boy, man, monster, lover and rises to meet all of it.

Sachirou brings his lips to Kourai’s inviting him to drink his essence from his mouth, just as they had done before when he was human and bleeding. Kourai’s claws sink into the softness he offers, and his hands are full of Kourai’s wings that fold to his touch. He offers up something more beautiful than blood, something more spectacular than his life. 

_ Love of equal strength. Evenly matched _ , he moves his mouth, but does not speak.  _ Forever. _

  
  
  


_ “And this is not the end of it. What else? The round goes on. The lamb loves its wolf. The wolf turns all white and starts quivering out of love of the lamb. The lamb loves the wolf’s fragility, and the wolf loves the frail one’s force. The wolf is now the lamb’s lamb and the lamb has tamed the wolf. Love blackens the lamb. _

_ Wolf, whom do you love? _

_ If only I knew!... _

_ Love—that’s: it. That’s id. That idself [ça même]. And it/id loves me [Ça m’aime]. _

_ And the fable is called the Wolf is the Lamb.” _

_ — Hélène Cixous _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know i said i wasn't going to write hiruhoshi again after finishing guiding stars, but then i saw this picture of hoshiumi kourai with plastic fangs on pixiv and the image would NOT leave my mind. [fangs hoshiumi](https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/85357459)! CAN U BELIEVE one doujin made me think of a whole backstory for vampire hoshiumi. wow. 
> 
> then the hirugami rp acc kept acting up all the time and im just like you know im sure he too would go wild over sexy vampire hoshiumi kourai. then this happened. damn you hoshiumi kourai. also the hirukita conversation is 10x funnier if you imagine two wise-cracking stoners having a good time. ok happy holidays everyone and thank you for reading. thank you ellie & cam for such a fun secret santa and making my life infinitely better this 2020 with your presences. love you both.
> 
> lastly, this hirugami doujin made me cry. i think it's one of the most stunning characterizations of him, it's in JP but it's so good: [link](https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/83859693)!


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